|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
WHY WE BEHAVE AS WE
DO
|
|
|
Dorothy Rowe
|
|
|
University of Middlesex, London, UK |
|
|
|
|
|
When I arrived in England
in 1968 I went to work at Whiteley Wood Clinic in Sheffield. This was
the
professorial clinic for the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Sheffield.
Alec Jenner had just been appointed professor, and he had a large
research
grant with which he planned to discover the biological basis of mood
change.
Alec suggested to me that I should take as my PhD research the topic
‘Psychological aspects of people with regular mood change’. It turned
out that
no such people actually existed, but at that stage I accepted Alec’s
word that
they did.
My immediate problem was to find some
way
of measuring change. In those days all psychological tests were
reliable, that
is, they didn’t measure change. Someone in the Psychology Department at
Sheffield University mentioned of a technique called a repertory grid,
and my
colleague Peter Clark told me about his great friend Don Bannister.
Peter
advised me to go to a conference on George Kelly and Personal Construct
Psychology which Don was organising at York University. So I went, and
I found
that PCP was the first and only kind of psychological theory which
actually
related to real human beings. That was wonderful, and also wonderful
was
meeting the Gang of Four, Don, Miller Mair, Phil Salmon and Fay
Fransella.
Eight years later Don played a major
part
in the biggest change in my career, perhaps my life. He liked the book
I had
written about my research into the way depressed people thought, and he
introduced me to Michael Coombes of the publishers John Wiley. They
published
what proved to be my first book, The
Experience of Depression (now called Choosing
Not Losing). Don’s early death was a great loss to me, as it was to
all of
us. His death was followed far too swiftly by that of Phil Salmon in
2005. I
count myself as fortunate to have been able to be with Phil and carry
out some
of her wishes, but I have to report that her death from cancer was
exceedingly
painful. Phil’s death showed only too clearly that we do not live in a
Just
World. Fortunately, Miller and Fay are still with us, though just where
Miller
is is something I’m never sure of.
Rather than give you an account of the
many
interesting and satisfying events in my life involving Fay I want to
mention
just one, a lecture she gave at a PCP conference a long time ago.
Nuclear
physics had just started to enter the public consciousness and Fay
decided to inform us about the
peculiar behaviour of nuclear particles. Thus I discovered that Fay,
like me,
had realised that to understand ourselves we need to understand the
world we
live in, not just its history and its current events, but its physical
nature
along with our beliefs about its nature, and how we perceive the world.
Science
and philosophy are essential parts of understanding ourselves.
Philosophers have always argued over
whether we can be aware of absolute truths or whether all we can know
are our
own relative truths. Plato insisted that there were perfect forms which
existed
eternally outside time and space, and which could be apprehended by
exceptional
people like himself. In contrast, Epictatus noted that, “It is not
things in
themselves which trouble us but our opinions of things.” Historically
Plato
outshone Epictatus because people who would be powerful favour the idea
of
being in possession of absolute truths. However, over the last twenty
years
neuroscientists have shown beyond doubt that Epictatus was right. All
we can
know are our own individual truths, the constructs, hypotheses,
meanings,
fictions – call them what you will – that our brain creates from our
experience. Since no two people ever have exactly the same experiences,
no two
people ever see anything in exactly the same way.
Thus what determines our behaviour is
not
what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us. The
neurologist
Antonio Damasio explained how the brain operates:
“The
neural patterns and the corresponding mental images of the objects and
events
outside the brain are creations of the brain related to the reality
that
prompts their creation rather than passive mirror images reflecting
that
reality . . . There is no picture of the object being transferred
optically
from the retina to the visual cortex. The optics stop at the retina.
Beyond
that there are physical transformations that occur in continuity from
the
retina to the cerebral cortex. Likewise, the sounds you hear are not
trumpeted
from the cochlea to the auditory cortex by some megaphone.” (Damasio, 2000, pp. 199-200)
What this means is that we are incapable
of
perceiving reality directly. All we can perceive are the meanings, or
images as
Damasio calls them, which our brain has constructed.
Something which psychologists need
always
to keep in mind is that, no matter how new and surprising your
discoveries in
your work might be, someone else has thought of it first. Nuclear
physicists
might discover something about the universe which no one else has ever
known
but in psychology there is nothing new under the sun. There are just
different
ways of describing and interpreting old ideas. It was Damasio who made
me
realise that the philosopher Spinoza had already covered what I write
about –
how preserving our sense of being a person is always our top priority,
and our
efforts to preserve our self are closely linked with our need to see
ourselves
as good, in whatever way we define ‘good’.
Spinoza was a Portuguese-Jewish
philosopher, born in 1632, who spent his short life in the Netherlands.
He
studied but rejected Descartes’ proposition that the soul (or mind) was
separate from the body, a concept which has been an enormous impediment
to our
understanding of ourselves. In his great work The Ethics Spinoza
proposed that the mind and body came from the
same substance and are, in effect, one. He saw too that the self, what
you call
‘I’, ‘me’, ‘myself’, and what Damasio has shown to grow slowly as the
brain
develops, strives to survive, and out of such striving comes a notion
that
dominates our lives, the idea of the necessity to be good. (If you are
a
sibling, remember how much time you spent trying to prove to your
parents that
you were ‘gooder’ than your siblings, and how dreadful you felt when
you failed
to achieve that. (Rowe, 2007)
Damasio wrote:
“The
quote comes from Proposition 18 in part IV of The
Ethics and it reads: ‘.. the very first
foundation of virtue is the endeavour (conatum) to preserve the
individual
self, and happiness consists in the human capacity to preserve itself.’
In
Latin the proposition reads . . . virtutis fundamentumesse ip sum
conatum
proprium esse conservandi, et felicitatem in eo consistere, quod homo
suum esse
conservare potest.” (Damasio, 2004,
p. 170)
Spinoza wrote in Latin and the words he
used have connotations slightly different from their equivalent in
English.
‘Virtutis’ is translated as virtue but it also means in Latin having
power and
the ability to act. We all want to think of ourselves as being good,
and we all
know the importance of being in charge of our lives and getting things
done. Also,
the Latin word ‘conatum’ is translated here as ‘endeavour’ but it means
more
than just trying. There is a sense of seeking and striving. The animal
scientist Temple Grandin, drawing on the work of the neurologist Jaak
Panksepp,
pointed out that the emotion of seeking is a primary emotion along with
anger
and fear. She wrote,
“Animals
and humans share a powerful and primal urge to seek out what they need
in life.
We depend on this emotion to stay alive, because curiosity and active
interest
in the environment help animals and people find good things, like food,
shelter, and a mate, and it helps us stay away from bad things, like
predators.” (Grandin & Johnson, 2005,
p. 94)
Human beings not only look for good
things
to stay alive but they also seek those people and situations which will
support
their sense of being a person.
In her work Fay has shown that the
meanings
we create are all connected to one another. These meanings form a
structure of
meaning, and it is this structure of meaning which develops the sense
of being
a person which we call I, me, myself. You are your structure of
meaning, your
structure of meaning is you.
We endeavour, as Spinoza said, “to
preserve
the individual self, and happiness consists in the human capacity to
preserve
itself.”
Personal construct psychologists have
already placed George Kelly in the Personal Construct Hall of Fame. I
propose
that we add to the Hall of Fame another three great personal construct
psychologists, Epictatus, Spinoza and Fay Fransella.
|
|
|
|
|
|
REFERENCES |
|
|
Damasio,
A. (2000). The feeling of what happens, London:
Vintage
(pp.199-200).
Damasio,
A. (2004). Looking for Spinoza London:
Vintage.
Grandin,
T. & Johnson, C. (2005). Animals in
translation. London: Bloomsbury.
Rowe,
D. (2007). My dearest enemy, my dangerous
friend: the making and breaking of sibling bonds London:
Routledge.
|
|
|
|
|
|
The article is based
on a talk given at the conference on 'PCP: a personal story' organised
by
the Centre for Personal Construct at the University of Hertfordshire, UK,
on September 29, 2006. |
|
|
|
|
|
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Dorothy
Rowe, Ph. D., is Professor at the University of Middlesex, London, UK. All
of Dorothy Rowe’s work is based on the assumption that what determines
our
behaviour is not what happens to us but how we interpret what happens
to us.
Her latest book is My Dearest Enemy,
My Dangerous Friend: The
Making and
Breaking of Sibling Bonds (Routledge, April 2007)
Email: dorothy@dorothyrowe.com.au
click on
photo to
enlarge
|
|
|
|
|
|
REFERENCE
Rowe, D.
(2007). Why we behave as we do. Personal
Construct Theory & Practice, 4, 50-52.
(Retrieved
from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp07/rowe07.html)
|
|
|
|
|
|
Received: 30 December 2006 – Accepted: 5 January 2007 –
Published: 31 January 2007
|
|
|
|
|
|