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A
DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY FOR OUR TIMES:
INTEGRATING DISCOURSE
AND PERSONAL CONSTRUCT
APPROACHES
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Jonathan Norton
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Counselling
Service, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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Abstract
Intersections
between social constructionism and personal construct psychology (PCP)
are
increasingly been explored. Not only are these traditions compatible,
but they
may require each other. For when constructs are seen not as personal
cognitions
in any way causing or “behind” behaviour, but configurations of thought
and
feeling which occur in action, then the social context of that action
arises as
of interest. At the same time, how ideas and cultural practices - or
“discourses” - become embodied in individuals and their actions, is
critical.
Discourse psychology presents an opportunity to develop a coherent
blending of
social constructionist ideas around discourse, with PCP. This paper
outlines
the key features of such an attempt. An account of a discourse approach
to
psychology is provided, and this is then used to make connections with,
and
expand upon, an account of PCP that thereby becomes more fully informed
by
discursive social constructionism.
Key words: depth psychology, discourse psychology,
social constructionism, personal construct psychology |
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INTRODUCTION
From time to time there is lip service
paid
to the need for psychologists to take into account the ‘social context’
of
behaviour. In practice, there has been a paucity of theoretical and
methodological
suggestions for achieving this laudable aim. In this paper it is
suggested that
we can conceive of ourselves as both social and individual, somewhat
like
physicists regard light as simultaneous a wave and a particle. As with
physics,
exactly what we see depends on how and why we look at it. A big picture
requires a superordinate vision, and a powerful theory can provide this.
One of the consequences of this view is
that it allows us to see that people are made up of different and
sometimes
conflicting elements determined by a variety of cultural demands, as
their
experience is created through language in particular social practices.
In
short, we fashion for ourselves a life out of the social resources -
the
discourses - around us.
Vivien Burr (1995, 2003) has been at the
forefront of providing a discourse oriented, social constructionist
account for
understanding psychological phenomena. As she notes, a danger in this
shift in
understanding is that the scope for personal intervention can appear
minimised,
and it may seem that people become tools of language and social
practice,
lacking agency. This is the reason why a fully realised depth
psychological
theory must have something to say about the reciprocal processes
whereby social
forces create individual experience and behaviour, yet are modified and
transformed by those individual actions. This brings us to the personal
construct psychology of George Kelly (1955). It is argued that Kelly’s
account
of personality is well suited to augment a discourse approach. I call
such an
integrated theoretical account ‘discourse psychology’. It views
discursive
practices and individual ‘construing’ (sense making) as different
facets of the
same phenomena. What follows is an elaboration of this idea. Both
elements are
founded in the use of language, and so it is to language we must first
turn.
A PRIMER ON DISCOURSE
Language and discourse
A major shift in the grounds of
psychological investigation has been occurring over the past twenty
years. This
shift challenges assumptions, held both inside and outside of
psychology, about
the nature of persons, and the proper focus for studying them. Above
all else,
this shift is characterised by a focus on language and meaning.
As part of this shift, language is seen
as
not merely representing the world, or functioning as a mirror which
reflects
the meanings people have in their minds (Davies and Harre, 1990).
Rather,
social conditions - the circumstances under which it is possible to
have
shared meanings which can be communicated in language - give rise to
the very
forms of speech or writing which are possible. These forms of language
in turn
give rise to the meanings and understandings available for people to
use, so
that “what we can know is what can be said” (Walker, 1988, p.74).
Further, in this view, psychological
phenomena are not things ‘in’ a person which a psychologist can
discover or
reveal, but are created by
the very language used to describe them, and the
meanings which become attached to that use (Shotter, 1993). These
phenomena
have a public reality, and it is a mistake to believe they have their
origin in
the heads of individuals (Burman and Parker, 1993).
Central to this argument is the idea
that
our talk and writing are constructed out of existing cultural resources
which
only make sense in an interpersonal context. These resources are
sometimes
referred to as ‘discourses’. One does not create these resources; they
are
borrowed and refashioned for one’s own purposes in any instantiation of
language use (Marshall and Raabe, 1993).
Foucault (1972, 1977, 1980, 1981)
studied
the ways in which, and under what conditions, different forms of
knowledge
emerged historically from social practices and cultural settings. He
argued
that meaning and knowledge are not universal, objective, and ‘real’,
but always
local, constructed and contested. For Foucault, knowledges are products
of
concrete social formations situated within, and inevitably linked to,
networks
of power relations.
Foucault proposed that discourses
encompass
both the symbolic application of meaning in contexts of interaction,
and the
conventions and relationships which make up the forms of human life in
which
these interactions take place (what we might also call ‘culture’). He
stated
that discourses can be treated as ‘practices that systematically form
the
objects of which they speak” (1972, p.49). This definition has some
important
consequences. It implies that objects -- such as the ‘self’ -- do not
exist
independently of the way in which they are spoken about in language.
Indeed
they only come to exist as objects when they are given existence
through
discourses. Further, the emphasis on discourse as practice implies that
discourses themselves do not have some superordinate reality. They are
not things,
but processes linked to human action. A discursive practice is the use
of a
sign system directed at or to some human interaction. Any use of
language is
itself a form of embodied action.
This account connects behaviour,
language
and meaning in a compelling way. For discourses abound in our social
world. One experiences things
like gender, race, class and identity through meanings
available in discourses (Davies and Harre, 1990). Thus subjective
experience
itself is produced through the construction of possible realities,
mediated by
available discourses. Discourses specify certain things about the way
the world
is, and those things are then taken for granted as the terms and
concepts of
the discourses are used in language. For example, the idea of a more or
less
fixed human essence, a human nature, is specified in many ancient and
modern
discourses. But discourses do not just describe phenomena. They bring
them into
sight (Parker, 1992a). In this way discourses are constitutive of
experience.
The psychological and social field is constructed, defined and
articulated
through discourse (Wetherell and Potter, 1992).
Discourses “permit and provoke the
phenomena we call cognition, and which we learn, in contemporary
western
culture, to funnel into single minds” (Parker, 1992a, p.92). They are
historically evolved and make up important parts of the common sense of
culture, as well as structuring the operation of multifarious
institutions
including the law, academia, politics, and popular culture. As Davies
and Harre
put it: “To know anything is to know in terms of one or more
discourses”
(1990, p.45).
In psychology, an approach founded on
discourse “demands a shift of topic from measured behaviour to the
dynamics of
meaning” (Parker, 1992a, p.69). It is compatible with psychology as a
discipline dedicated to understanding meaning and human action, through
being
concerned with “the diversity of discourses we live in and are shaped
by, use
and are used by” (Mair, 1989b, p.2).
Social construction
Discourse approaches embrace, and
contribute to, the broader canvas of social constructionism. This is a
dedicated movement with many origins, and one which has had some
influence in
psychology (Gergen, 1985; Burr, 1995). A social constructionist holds
that all
so-called realities of social life are constructed, ‘imaginary’,
contested, and
situated in specific historical circumstances. The assumption of an
already
stable and well formed reality beyond appearances (which can be
perceived
through an abstract set of principles or by revealing the ‘true’ inner
workings
of the psyche) must instead be replaced by that of a “vague, only
partially
specified, unstable world, open to further specification as a result of
human,
communicative activity” (Shotter, 1993, p.179). The focus is less on
understanding how a person comes to operate in, and know, the real
external
world around them. Rather, emphasis is placed on how people are related
to
others and to their world, and then on how that creates their reality.
For
Burr, the social constructionist critique also extends to revealing
that
psychological theorising does not depict reality, but is partial in
being only
one way of seeing the world among many, and reflects vested interests
(Burr,
1995 & 2003)
Subjectivity
Sampson (1989) has argued that we do not
begin with two independent entities, individual and society, which are
formed
and defined apart from one another and interact as though each were
external to
the other. Rather, “society constitutes and inhabits the very core of
whatever
passes for personhood,” (Sampson, 1988, p.4). In this sense, every self
presupposes a ‘world’ (Mair, 1989a).
Discourse approaches allow for
deconstruction of the modernist split between individual and society.
Outside
psychology, for example in social theory and political science,
attempts have
been made to marry the social with the individual, usually with the
help of
psychoanalysis. The concept of ‘subjectivity’ is central to this. It is
a
specialised notion which is not to be understood as simply meaning the
opposite
of objectivity. Rather, it is synonymous with subjective ‘experience’
- but
with a particular slant: the experience of being constituted in
language by
discourses. It is used to signify that ‘objects’ like selfhood and
individuality
are constructed within networks of meaning. What a person is taken to
be, and
the qualities and capacities that accrue to persons, depend on the
language
used to describe them, and on what can possibly be said within the
constraints
of discourses.
Thus “a subject, a sense of self, is a
location constructed within the expressive sphere which finds its voice
through
the cluster of attributes and responsibilities assigned to it as a
variety of
object” (Parker, 1992a, p.9). An ‘individual’ is an entity constituted
through, or signified by, the various discursive practices in which it
is given
space to participate. The result can be thought of as the way things
appear to
a person in relation to a discursive context.
Such a concept goes a long way to
bridging
the individual-society split in a psychological manner, through
understanding
societies as organised, ‘brought forth’ and given realisation by
discourses,
and at the same time through viewing individuals and their
psychological worlds
as the located ‘claims’ of identity allowed for, and constructed
within, a
multitude of coexisting discourses.
Fragmentation
In the twentieth century, psychoanalysis
has mounted a substantial critique of the idea of the person as a
coherent,
unified, uncontradictory entity. It has suggested that people are
internally
divided between different aspects of personality: between conscious and
unconscious, and between competing impulses.
With the discourse approach, the notion
of
the rational, unitary self is also put into question, through the study
of
fragments of subjectivity which operate through different discourses.
Internal
conflict is not considered a sign of dissonance or ambivalence in the
emotional
and cognitive apparatuses of individuals, but a normal discursive (and
therefore psychological) process. Frameworks compete in articulating
issues.
The fragmentation point means that
subjectivity is multiple - it draws on multiple discourses. This is
sometimes
referred to as the 'divided subject' (Henriques, et al, 1984). Our
identity is
both continuous and discontinuous, in that we have “the continuity of a
multiplicity of selves” (Davies and Harre, 1990, p.47). In addition,
people
acquire beliefs about themselves which do not form a unified whole.
They shift
from one way of thinking about themselves to another as the discourse
shifts
and their ‘positions’ are taken up within different contexts.
Positioning
Another valuable tool that emerges from
an
approach based on discourse and subjectivity is that of the ‘position’.
As the
discussion of subjectivity above suggested, whilst a discourse is
‘about’
objects, it also ‘contains’ subjects (Parker, 1992a). That is, a
discourse
makes available a space or a ‘position’ into which a particular type of
self
may step. The idea of ‘positioning’ gives recognition to the ways in
which
people are located by discursive practices. Subjectivity is generated
through
the use of discourses from specific positions. This is a much more
useful
concept than the more static notion of ‘role’ (Davies and Harre, 1990).
It is the positioning by discourses
which
produces what is called experience. The positions of ‘psychotherapist’
and
‘client’ set up a relation within which utterances are made sense of in
particular ways. Similarly, the positions of ‘research psychologist’
and
‘experimental subject’ inscribe two people within a discourse and
confer on
them differentiated and relatively specific functions and powers. The
concept
of positioning “recognises both the power of culturally available
discourses to
frame our experience and constrain our behaviour while allowing room
for the
person to actively engage with those discourses and employ them in
social
situations” (Burr, 2003, p.113).
Positioning in turn throws light on the
idea of fragmentation and what has come to be referred to as the
‘divided
subject’. Fragmentation can be understood as resulting from conflicts
between
different discursive positions which may be drawn on at different
times.
Alternatively, a subject may be in a position (or use language) which
signifies
simultaneously in a multiple number of potentially contradictory ways,
depending on numerous factors including other social actors involved
and the
particular context.
Ideology
Discourses are ‘productive’. That is,
they
give rise to possibilities for action and being. But they also exclude
possibilities. They circumscribe ways of representing and understanding
the
social world, which thereby preclude seeing things in alternative ways.
They
enable and constrain, facilitate and limit what can be said, by whom,
where and
when (Parker, 1992a; Howarth, 2001). These constraining and enabling
functions
of discursive practices mean that discourses can be appropriated to
effect
relations of power. Contemporary social theory uses the term ‘ideology’
to
refer to such relations.
According to Althusser (1968),
ideological
discourses ‘interpellate’ or ‘call’ subjects to positions so as to
achieve
specific effects of power. In other words, an ideology constructs a
series of
social positions which provide ways of giving meaning to, and
representing
reality. It thereby offers believable ways of making sense of
experience.
Ideology then becomes a label which identifies the coercive function of
meaning
in specific social contexts (Thompson, 1984). Processes of
legitimatisation,
rationalisation, naturalisation and justification are central to the
ways
ideology works (the historical silence and marginalisation of the
experience of
women is an example). Ideology is thus tied to social institutions, as
“Institutions
do not simply structure social life, they also constrain what can be
said, who
can say it, and how people may act and conceive of their own agency and
subjectivity” (Parker, 1994, p. 103).
Ideology is not just about ideas or
beliefs. It concerns material life, practical and moral conduct, and
bodily
existence. As a series of relationships, ideology drives social
production and
reproduction through the combined effects of the circulation of
preexisting
discourses (‘stories’ about the world) with the exercise of power.
Ideology
allows certain groups to tell their narratives about the past to
justify the
present (Said, 1993), whilst preventing others from making history.
The above depiction of ideology might
give
the impression that humans have limited agency, that we are all just
‘subjected’ to positions within a rigid system in which we
(mis)recognise
ourselves, leaving no space for freedom. There is indeed controversy
here, and
tensions exist between personal construct approaches and social
constructionism
on the subject (Warren, 2005). But some of the most insightful discussion of
ideology can
be found in the work of the eminent scholar Bob Connell (Connell, 1987,
1993,
1995, 2002). Writing in the context of gender, Connell has elaborated a
hegemonic
view of ideology, in which individuals are subject to “emergent sets of
pressures and possibilities within which the actual diversity of
personality is
composed” (Connell, 1987, p.224). Ideological social practices and
individual
experiences (which are different perspectives on the one set of
processes) are
potentially transformative.
As Connell notes in discussing masculinity, one
cannot be masculine in a particular way without “affecting the
conditions in
which that form of masculinity arose; whether to reproduce them,
intensify
them, or subvert them” (1993, p.302).
From this stance it is held both that
subjects ‘use’ discourses, and that discourses play themselves out
through the
actions and inner worlds of individuals who identify themselves through
particular meanings, ideas and ideals. In other words, one is
positioned in
discourses both by oneself, and yet also through the operations of
power.
Parker expresses this when he revises a dictum of Marx: “People ‘make’
discourse, but not in discursive conditions of their own choosing”
(1992a,
p.32).
Consideration of ideology allows us to
examine psychological phenomena not in terms of a search for truth, but
as one
set of ‘truths’ held in place by language and power. Adding ideology to
the
discourse psychology oeuvre permits, more than anything else,
understanding
that power relations enter into the construction of what it means to be
human
in the first place, and into the possible worlds that can be imagined.
Personality theory
Finally, as noted in the introduction, a
discourse approach requires ‘models of the person’ compatible with it
(Parker,
1990). Without such models, there is a danger that a discourse account
will
tell us nothing about the uniqueness of the experience of human beings,
or about
the scope and degree of their freedom. For “to say that people are
negotiators
of positions, or that their subjectivity is formed by discourses says
nothing
about how these processes are supposed to operate” (Burr, 2003, p.180).
We need
to explain and understand these very real phenomena.
The model of the person which theorists
have generally used to elaborate the discourse approach has been one
influenced
by psychoanalysis. There are several reasons for this. First,
psychoanalysis
theorises a divided and fragmented subject, and so is immediately
appealing to
any discursive account of subjectivity (Henriques et al, 1984). Second,
the
poststructuralist and social constructionist traditions from which the
psychological study of discourses has in part emerged, retain an
abiding
fascination with psychoanalysis, particularly of the Lacanian variety.
In many
cases the appropriation of psychoanalysis seems to have been undertaken
with
little examination of the weaknesses of this move, or of other
possibilities (Burr,
2003). An alternative does exist in the form of personal construct
psychology.
A DISCOURSE-CONSTRUCTIVIST
MODEL
There have been some recent explorations
of
how personal construct psychology can be used to enhance a
understanding of the
social construction of knowledge and reality (Butt and Burr, 1994;
Warren,
2004). In particular Harre and Gillett (1994) have sketched a reading
of Kelly
which links personal construct thought with a discourse approach in
psychology;
what follows draws and expands upon their account.
In accordance with a discourse approach
to
psychology, Kelly believed that social psychology needs to be a
psychology of
interpersonal understandings (Kenny, 1984). Our constructions of the
world
emerge not through the abstracted and detached inner processing of a
self-contained individual; they result from our interactions with the
world,
and our encounter with surrounding social structures and relationships.
In this
sense, like the dialectic between subjectivity and discourse, there is
a
recursive relationship between person and events – “not a rigid or
destructive
forcing of the person’s perspective of the event, not an overly passive
flooding
of the person by events” (Epting and Amerikaner, 1980, p.58).
From here, there are some immediately
striking connections between a psychology informed by discourse theory,
and
personal construct theory. In both, meaning-making is central. The
metaphor of
construction is also common to both personal construct and discourse
approaches. It is instructive that Kelly even considered using the term
‘reconstruction’ rather than therapy to describe what he was trying to
do
clinically (Fransella, 1985). Further, Kelly’s ‘as if’ approach to
psychological understanding accords with a discourse perspective
emphasising
the constructed and contingent nature of meaning, wherein people see
themselves as if they
‘really’ are the way that discourses portray them to be.
Linking constructs and
discourses
Constructs, like discourses, create and
constrain new experience. They determine what will be perceived as
reality.
They bring phenomena into being. Indeed constructs can be seen as
effects or
artefacts of discourses. People do make ‘personal’ discriminations
between
features of an event, but the categories they use and the criteria for
distinguishing are both thoroughly discursive and thoroughly
idiosyncratic. So
are the means for validating constructs. A person “depends on and
appropriates
those meanings available in discourse” (Harre and Gillett, 1994,
p.140). Kelly
himself acknowledged that cultural influence exists within a person’s
construct
system and ‘limits the kinds of evidence at his [sic] disposal"
(Kelly, 1955,
p.693).
The resources for building a construct
system are therefore always pre-existent, and carry meanings and
effects beyond
what is intended by an individual’s ‘appropriation’ of them. Similarly,
psychological phenomena, being discursive, are connected to meanings
and
effects which extend beyond the immediate occurrence of those
phenomena. To construe
oneself as ‘depressed’ does not give insight into the ‘true’ condition
of one’s
psyche; it demonstrates an awareness of a (relatively fuzzy) resource
inscribed
within a contemporary discourse of mental illness, which is being used
to
interpret, enact and thereby bring
existence to a form of one’s embodied
existence.
This view opposes two assumptions of
conventional psychology: that there are ‘real’ phenomena (like
depression) to
be recognised in people, and that there are definite ways to represent
these
phenomena (for example, through an ‘accurate’ model of depression).
These
assumptions are replaced by the idea that all phenomena exist only in
so far as
they are brought into existence through discursive practices (that is,
through
construing). This ‘bringing forth’ in the context of interaction thus
constitutes both the phenomena and their representation. Depression
becomes an
outcome of the network of meaning structures people have about
themselves and
the world (Rowe, 2004).
Kelly suggested that to construe is to
hear
the whisper of recurring themes which reverberate around us. In other
words,
"people personify themselves with socially embedded meanings"
(Hoshmond, 1993,
p.181). Psychological similarity to others is seen in terms of common
ways of
interpreting the world, which results from the common pool of
discursive
resources available. Realities are created by and through the
conversational
(and therefore discursive) practices which people are involved in and
undertake
(Mair, 1989a; Shotter, 1993).
From here it is possible to discern that
“self
location within discourse is the key to understanding constructs and
through
them personality. People adopt or commit themselves to certain
positions in the
discourse that they…inhabit” (Harre and Gillett, 1994, p.140). This
directs
attention to the meanings or images in terms of which people construe
their own
identities.
In such an approach, the study of the
mind
can be seen as a way of understanding the phenomena that arise when
discourses
are represented within an individual person who is positioned (and
positions
oneself) in relation to those discourses. Human uniqueness is accounted
for, in
that each individual has an idiosyncratic or ‘personal’ ordering of
constructs,
with discourses nonetheless inhabiting the very heart of the constructs
that
define one’s self-conceived ‘essence’. The discourse view of
personality does
not then need to find a distinct set of inner processes to explain the
uniqueness of each human being, because every human being is unique in
ways
directly relevant to psychological explanation. “Each human individual
stands
at a unique intersection point of human discourses and relationships”
(Harre
and Gillett, 1994, p.132-3).
In short, people are ‘coherent’ entities
to
the extent that they adopt various positions within different
discourses and
thereby fashion for themselves a unique system of personalised
constructs (Butt
and Burr, 1994). Human understanding of self and world thus involves
being well
versed in discourses. This echoes Wittgenstein’s (1980) conception of
knowledge
not as accuracy of representation, but a matter of knowing one’s way
about.
Self knowledge becomes not so much the product of in-depth probing of
the
psyche, as the result of a skill with discourses, a knowing how, an
understanding of what determines oneself (Gergen, 1989). This also
confirms why
discourses are an appropriate subject matter for psychology: “A lesser
conception of human beings and of psychology… fails to display the
richness of
the human mind and personality, which draw on meaning and value as
determined
within discursive contexts” (Harre and Gillett, 1994. p.143).
Back to ideology
We can only ever learn what our
construct
system allows us to see in events (Kenny, 1984). This provides a clear
link to
the operation of ideology. It aids in understanding how ideology
inhabits the
core of subjectivities - by things being portrayed in one way rather
than in
other ways. This is an underemphasised part of Harre and Gillett’s
account.
Kelly thought that where one places oneself along a construct dimension
is not
as important as the fact that the construct has evolved in the first
place.
Constructs derive from discourses which can achieve certain ideological
effects, and which are often sustained by ideological supports.
Experience is
linked to ideology because discourses direct construing along certain
lines. In
this sense, people are not so much ‘dominated’ by ideological power, as
solicited into linking personal interpretations, constructions and
hypotheses
with institutionally valued ways of living (Rose, 1990).
But discourses enter into the psychology
of
personal constructs in another way relating to ideology. Kelly
suggested that
cultural dictates and preferences are often the validators of
constructs. So
not only do discourses provide the resources for construing, but they
also
constitute the meanings in relation to which anticipations are tested.
To the
extent that an ideology promotes certain social arrangements as
‘normal’ or
‘natural’, it validates certain sorts of experience and not others.
Thus it
contributes to the maintenance of construct systems which at least in
part
serve ideological ends.
Positioning
The notion of ‘positioning’ has found
some
elaboration in the context of personal construct theory. Salmon argues
that
people’s placement in relation to their worlds is a fundamental means
by which
they are defined: “If we see people as embodying their experience, and
as
taking stances towards their lives, we can, I think, achieve a better
understanding of what they do, since it is our position towards our
lives which
governs the kinds of engagements possible for us” (1985, p.181).
Another way
of saying this is that reality is constructed by ‘translating’
discourses into
personal terms. In this way, people both are positioned, and position
themselves in discursive space (Burr, 2003). It is possible to read in
Kelly an
implicit view of positioning when he says that “the use of constructs
is a
matter of choosing vestibules through which one passes” (1955, p.66).
So we do
still need a personal psychology, as the nature and form of the
putative
‘translation’ is neither fixed nor predictable (again drawing on
arguments for
personal agency within hegemonic forms of ideology). To adequately
understand
people, we need to analyse both the
discourses in which they are located, and
their positioning of themselves in relation to those contexts.
Threat
In personal construct theory something
is defined
as ‘threatening’ if it “makes us aware at some level of imminent change
in the ways
in which we see ourselves” (Fransella, 1983, p.92). It occurs
“whenever we
perceive at some level of awareness, imminent change in some central
personal
commitment, in some cherished view of ourselves” (Fransella, 1983,
p.92). In
other words, change is threatening when it brings about awareness of
the need
to reconstrue our identity in some radical manner. This awareness may
be
explicit but also at the very edges of understanding.
This provides a powerful account of the
robustness of identities and of concepts like gender, and adherence to
particular self constructions and discursive positions. The apparent
implications of some forms of change can be threatening to our core
constructs,
and threatening in terms of the very ways and means by which we make
sense of
the world (Viney, 1993). Our familiar identity and known world tend to
be
protected so as to keep our present ‘story’ about ourselves safe. In
turn, we
feel more able to manage an often shifting and unstable life.
Kelly’s theory is free of postulations
about drives, impulses and inner energy (Kenny, 1984). People are not
moved by
forces in relation to which they are passive. They are moved by their
own ways
of construing events and objects. People are constantly in this process
of
movement. The ‘motivation’ of wanting to anticipate events -- as part
of sense
making -- is enough to explain that subjects will adopt and maintain at
least
some subject positions. Kelly’s notion of ‘threat’ can therefore help
explain
persistent adherence to particular positions, and regularised use of
certain
discourses.
In constituting oneself through social
practice, one enters into a relation with discourses which “may act
powerfully
as motives, defenses, identifications, commitments and fears”
(Connell, 1987,
p.223). It is these features which ‘fix’ us as subjects in the context
of
threat associated with awareness of radical alternatives and
possibilities of
change. There is a security in limiting ourselves and accommodating to
the
ideological world which pre-exists and creates us. Thus power inserts
itself
into subjectivity, through influencing the ongoing aims of anticipating
the
world and one’s place in it.
Fragmentation and
subjectivity
An account of fragmentation follows from
this. Indeed, one of the assertions which Kelly offered as part of the
formalisation of his theory, the ‘fragmentation corollary’, marks a
clear link
with the ‘divided subject’. It states: A person may successively employ a
variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible
with
each other (Kelly, 1955). Or, in discourse terms, a person may,
at different
times, or even at the same time, be located in conflicting positions in
social
space, so that “each of the possible selves can be internally
contradictory or
contradictory with other possible selves located in different story
lines”
(Davies and Harre, 1990, p.58-9).
In terms of a theory of subjectivity, it
is
evident that Kelly’s notion of the person refers not to entities
understood in
isolation, but to individuals’ hypotheses about how to be in connection
with
others. The postulation of core role constructs underlines this, in
emphasising
that we know ourselves by the sense of social space we occupy in
relation to
others. It is entirely consistent with a view that “our subjective
experience
of ourselves, of being the person we take ourselves to be, is given by
they
variety of subject positions… that we take up in discourse” (Burr,
2003,
p.120).
Advantages of connecting
discourses with constructs
I have proposed that discursive
practices
can be seen as resources for the ongoing elaboration of construct
systems. At
the same time, people are positioned or constituted in certain ways by
those
practices. The personal construct approach involves understanding
people from their
point of view, concerned with their meanings
and constructions. This is
important, too, for discourse psychology (Shotter, 1990), and
installing
personal construct theory within discourse psychology account balances
tendencies towards abstraction in analysing the operation of discourses.
Personal construct theory thereby adds
to
the components for human understanding that are available to a
discourse
psychologist. It helps understand that change (which is always both
personal and
social) comes about as a recursive process involving the reconstruction
of
meaning systems within the changing discourses made available through
evolving
material and cultural conditions. This is a type of ‘structuration’
account of
social relations (Giddens, 1984; Cash 1996) where one both reproduces
and
transforms social structures every time one instantiates some aspect of
those
structures.
One is both created by a social order,
and
creates it. In this connection, it is possible to conceive of
experience as
mediated by meanings available through discourses, and the product of
the way a
person constructs particular encounters. After all, what a person ‘is’
results
from the fact that they have had one cumulative set of experiences
rather than
another (Scholes, 1987). In this sense, we are beings always ‘in
motion’.
This combination of discourses and
constructs also helps envisage that both who one is, and what one is
like
‘psychologically’, are achievements and accomplishments brought about
via a
simultaneously public and private process of construction. It makes
clear that
“the power relations of the society become a constitutive principle of
personality dynamics through being adopted as a personal project,
whether
acknowledged or not” (Connell, 1987, p.215).
Kelly’s theory complements a discourse
approach, and vice versa, each refusing the notion of a human essence,
and
emphasising the different things which humans have made of themselves.
Further,
it connects strongly with a discursive orientation to the future
stressing the
openness of what we may become, of what people may make of themselves
(Mair,
1977).
Limitations and tensions
Nonetheless things are a bit more
complicated than have so far been portrayed. A difficult issue concerns
the
status of ‘preverbal constructs’. If meaning is thoroughly discursive,
what is
the status of constructs which are functional but not inscribed in
language?
Could ‘discursive resources’ include extralinguistic entities, or could
discourses be inscribed in the body? In fact, Foucault tries to make
precisely
the latter point: "Power relations can materially penetrate the body in
depth,
without depending on the mediation of the subject’s own
representations"
(Foucault, 1980, p.186).
So maybe a theory of discourse can learn
from the personal construct approach here. If sense-making can include
somatic
and physiological dimensions, then, given the wish to hold that
discourses are
the stuff of sense-making, it may pay to have an understanding of
discourses as
encompassing such dimensions, as being embodied (Butt, 1998). It will
still be
possible to view discourses as historical and contingent, and to
maintain that
the apprehension of those
dimensions in any sense-making procedure is in the
final instance a linguistic enterprise. All this provides a strong
reminder
that construing is not merely ‘cognitive’ whilst retaining the idea
that
psychological reality is brought forth in language as experiences are
created
through our discursive conversational practices.
Kelly too is illuminating here. He says
a
preverbal construct “is one which continues to be used even though it
has no
consistent word symbol” (1955, p.564). So perhaps preverbal constructs
exist
in a shifting, playful relation to language, and are brought forth in
multiple
and varying ways.
One of the alleged weaknesses of
personal
construct theory is that it fails to specify conditions under which one
construct is ‘adopted’ or devised rather than another (Hall and
Lindzey, 1978).
Similarly, one could ask under what conditions one discourse is chosen
and not
another. But maybe we should stand in this uncertain space. It could be
considered as the space in which freedom exists. This introduces a
radical
indeterminacy into the evolution of subjectivities (and hence an
openness to
possibilities of social change), and also acknowledges that it is
impossible to
conceive of human life with perfect cause and effect precision.
Curiously, this
same type of argument has recently been made in relation to
neuroscience
(Horgan, 1999).
CONCLUSION
Discourses create positions and
resources
for construing, with power conferring varying effects on the different
positions within which construing takes place. This adds to our
understanding
of how people make sense of their world through personal constructs. On
the
other hand, understanding how discourses are taken up and used as
resources in consistent and robust ways
is enhanced by personal construct theory through the importance
accorded to human needs to anticipate events and validate constructs,
and the
influence on individuals of threat which arises from potential changes
to
self-conceptions. At the end of the day, the emphasis here returns to
people
being engaged in meaning making, and thereby as ‘beings in motion’.
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ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Jonathan Norton is a counselling
psychologist who has practiced in Dublin, London
and Melbourne in a variety of health, education, community and private
settings.
He presently works at the Counselling Service at the University of Melbourne, and
is Honorary Lecturer in Psychology at Monash University. Email: jnorton@unimelb.edu.au
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REFERENCE
Norton, J.
(2006). A depth psychology for our times: Integrating discourse and
personal construct approaches. Personal
Construct Theory & Practice, 3, 16-26.
(Retrieved from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp06/norton06.html)
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Received: 30 March 2006 – Accepted: 14 August 2006 -
Published: 15 August 2006
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