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KELLY, JESUS,
AND PAUL:
A commentary on Jonathan D. Raskin: 'Don't cry for me George A. Kelly:
Human involvement and the construing of Personal Construct Psychology'
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Rue L. Cromwell
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Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Kansas City,
Kansas, USA |
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Two of Garry Will's recent books have
been What Jesus meant (2006) and What
Paul meant (2006). Jonathan Raskin
(this issue, 2006, p. xx-xx) places the question "What did Kelly really
mean?" Garry Wills in his powerful writing has succeeded in placing a
thorn in the side of contemporary conservative, fundamentalist, and
papal
religion. George A. Kelly (1955), likewise, placed a thorn in the side
of
contemporary psychology. Even with this attributed purpose I have good
reason
to believe that Jesus, Paul, and Kelly are not accessible to tell me
personally
what they really meant.
In our entire itinerary of experiencing
existence we make constructs as we go along. Then, as security blanket,
we
reify the elements of these constructs and thereby feel more
comfortable. So,
"real" and "meaning" are simply attributes that we have
awarded. Whether Kelly, Jesus, or Paul would affirm these awards for us
is
another matter.
A central intent in Raskin's tract is to
challenge the habit among scholars of personal construct theory (PCP)
to cite
quotations by Kelly to affirm what Kelly really meant. In rebuttal
Raskin moves
to the thesis that the consummatory goal for assessing Kelly's theory
is not so
much what was true in some kind of real way "but more so on how
convincing
an argument I made and whether the implications of my argument were
deemed
generative by readers (Raskin, op. cit., p. 56)." In this statement
Raskin
at once has made his paper a powerful one with powerful issues at
stake. To
this I say bravo, but also I say let's look at the bath water being
splashed
away.
Let me tell a story. A while back I
attended a series of lectures about William James and the revival of
pragmatism. (By the way, Kelly cites William James in the opening pages
of his
two volumes.) Sponsored by the humanities area of the university, only
philosophy, religion, and history were represented in the
audience--except for
one psychologist, i.e., me. The method for speaker and audience to
arrive at
truth statements, I learned, was to diverge--to cite and integrate
wider and
wider sources from James' central writings, his peripheral writings,
and from
relevant scholarly sources by others on the issues at hand. As
discrepancy or
contradiction arose, the collected quotations, arranged logically, were
employed to resolve conflict and to trump vagrant viewpoints. In
contrast, my
own truth statement practice as an experimental clinical psychologist
was to
search amicably among the discussants to converge upon some crucial
testable
hypothesis that, if disconfirmed by empirical data, would leave the
tenets of
James' theoretical formulations in jeopardy. By injecting this line of
query it
seemed as if I were facing an army of generalists who were so well
rounded that
there was no point to be found, and I was the David who searched for a
bullet
to know more and more about less and less until I could empirically
verify
everything about nothing. Such bipolarity as I may have imagined put
aside, my
convergent style of thinking was not only foreign to the audience but
produced
many scornful and jaundiced eye. People wondered where this "black
sheep
(aka black creep)" came from.
Kelly used the word "brittle
hypothesis." Popper called it falsifiability of a theory's
propositions. I
choose to call it disconfirmability (by controlled investigation).
However
called, a basic tenet of experimental method is that if you cannot
state the
conditions and observations by which a formulation can be potentially
disconfirmed, then you do not have a scientific theory. Newtonian and
Darwinian
theory, in turn, have met this criterion and have buckled in specific
ways.
Creationism and intelligent design have failed the test and have become
formulations not of science but of advocacy. Kelly has held the tenet
up as an
emblem for PCP.
My conclusion re Raskin's thesis is
twofold. To remain solely in the realm of citing chapter and verse is
nonproductive alike for the individual investigator, for the individual
clinician, and for the general evolution of PCP beyond a static dated
theory.
Who said it, if Kelly were alive today he would not be a Kellian? But
the other
side of the picture is that these two kinds of epistemology indeed
exist. As I
learned in my James colloquium, even seasoned scholars are often
unfamiliar
with the territory of the other. In the end, knowledge advances if
these
divergent and convergent methods feast upon one another.
A second issue concerns Raskin's choice
of the weeping nosology (ibid., this issue) and its alleged
incompatibility
with general theory in PCP. Raskin makes very clear arguments that the
alleged
typology is incompatible with the general PCP theory. Assuming that the
discrepancy is not in the eyes of us
beholders but inherently in the theory illogic, he carefully
acknowledges that
one cannot then discern onto which attribution we should assign "the
real
Kelly." Let me first take pause and ask whether these kinds of weepings
indeed represent a formal typology.
As for weeping, Kelly was indeed
influenced of his own claim by role theory, his directing college
theatre, and Moreno's
psychodrama. Although
Raskin cited reports of Kelly's crying during clinical supervision
sessions, I
saw it not. By the time of my passage (1950-1955), he must have been
wept dry.
Many alternative interpretations are
possible to account for what would appear a discrepancy between the
weeping
typology and his "theory general." The first alternative is that
Raskin is right. As Kelly read his chapter manuscripts to his Wednesday
night
nucleus of students, the students would often catch contradictions like
this
and figuratively beat Kelly to a pulp. It may be that on the evening
this theme
of weeping was offered, the students' wits may already have become
glazed by
the beer. If so, shame on both Kelly and students.
Another alternative is that, as Raskin
noted, Kelly was well known for the colossal spoof. Sometimes he would
see how
far he could lead a student down "the garden path" before the student
discovered he had been merely made a fool. This was sometimes Kelly's
tough
terminal pedagogy, but it seems unlikely he would do this with his
readers.
Another alternative, which I offer with
favor, is that what appears as a formal typology is not indeed the
case. Kelly,
well versed in psychometrics, was well informed of the need for
normative
scaling, reliability, predictive validity, profiling of orthogonal
factors, use
of percentiles to achieve a level playing field for comparison. Such
matters he
freely explored with rep grid work. He despised them in assessing
groups of
individuals and called it quantitative sociology. Accordingly,
psychometric
typology-making is not evident with the weeping. My tentative
conclusion,
therefore, is that Kelly was offering the beginning clinician a series
of alternative
saddles. Each might be useful to mount their longitudinal ride into
psychotherapy. If this formulation is correct, then the criticisms
enumerated
by Raskin would be "off the mark." Kelly was always concerned
(perhaps because of his own excessive need for control) that student
clinicians
not get lost within either the construct systems or the emotions of
their
clients. Instead they should subsume each individual client's construct
system
within her or his own integral personal construct system. (Kelly
emphasized his
view here as different from Carl Rogers' emphasis upon empathy and
positive
regard, the Rogerian view being a submerging into rather than securing
of
superordinate perspective for each client's construct system.) Within
this
context Kelly may have been offering not a formal typology but a list
of
alternative constructs from which the therapeutic journey would be
launched.
Other issues are raised by Raskin that
are of such importance that they deserve address in a separate paper.
Among them
is the comparison of the different kinds of constructivisms and how
they relate
to other theoretical perspectives. Of particular interest and to the
creative
credit of Raskin is the illumination of relativism vs. absolutism in
thinking.
Not only does Raskin explode this bipolarity as a philosophical dilemma
but
also he implicitly rejects relativist vs. absolutist thinking as a
trait on
which individuals differ one from another. Instead, absolutist and
relativist
thinking are momentary states that occur within the same individual,
depending
upon whether she or he is construing alternatives or committing to a
particular
decision. In this respect Raskin rightfully quotes McWilliams' (1996)
plea that
we "take conscious responsibility for our personal participation in
creating meaning." In that responsibility is the "committing" as
well as the "relativizing." These issues, if anything, are even more
important than the central topic of Raskin's paper, and they deserve
separate
and full attention.
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REFERENCES |
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Kelly, G.
A. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs. New
York: Norton. 2 volumes.
McWilliams, S. A. (1996), Accepting the
invitational. In B. M. Walker, J. Costigan, L. L. Viney, & B.
Warren
(Eds.), Personal construct theory: A
psychology for the future (pp. 57-78). Melbourne:
Australian Psychological
Society.
Raskin, J. (2006). Don't cry for me
George A. Kelly: Human involvement and the construing of personal
construct
psychology. This issue.
Wills, G. (2006). What Jesus meant. New
York: Viking Adult.
Wills, G. (2006). What Paul meant. New
York: Viking Adult. |
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ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Rue L. Cromwell,
the M. Erik Wright Professor Emeritus of
Clinical Psychology of University of Kansas (AB 1950, Indiana
University; MA,
1952, PhD, 1955, The Ohio State University) is working on a book Being Human: Human Being.
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REFERENCE
Cromwell, R. L. (2006). Kelly,
Jesus, and
Paul. A commentary on Jonathan D. Raskin ‘Don’t cry for me George A.
Kelly: Human involvement and the
construing of
personal construct psychology’. Personal
Construct Theory & Practice, 3, 62-64
(Retrieved from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp06/cromwell06.html)
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Received: 1 December 2006 – Accepted: 5 December
2006 –
Published: 31 December 2006
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