|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
INTRODUCING YOU TO DENNIS N.
HINKLE
|
|
|
Fay Fransella |
|
|
Centre for Personal
Construct Psychology, University of Hertfordshire, UK
|
|
|
|
|
| I forget exactly
when it was that I first met Denny. It was certainly after the formation of the
Kelly Club which met in London. It was also after I had finished my PhD
which was totally influenced by his dissertation on “The change of personal
constructs from the viewpoint of a theory of construct implications”. My
scanning of that dissertation is one way I feel I have been able to repay him
for the insight he gave me into why people may continue to stutter when it is
simply not how they want to communicate. People often think his great
contribution was describing the procedure of laddering and a few also
know about his implications grid. Even fewer know of his resistance-to-change
grid. What hardly anyone is aware of is the extraordinary originality of
his theorising. He posed the question: “if a construct can be loose or tight,
permeable or impermeable, propositional or constellatory from time to time,
what then defines a construct? This constitutes the essential point of
departure for this dissertation”. His answer was the theory of construct
implications. To me it is his theory that makes it so important that his dissertation
be made widely available. First of all he re-defined all Kelly’s corollaries in
terms of implications. For me, the most important re-definition was that of the
Choice Corollary. His theory states that this Corollary says “A person
chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which
he anticipates the greater possibility for increasing the total number of
implications of his system. That is to say, a person always chooses so as to
avoid the anxiety of chaos and the despair of absolute certainty”. Were that to
be so, then those who stutter ‘choose’ to remain like that because that is the
way each person can increase the total number of implications of his or her construing
system. To ‘choose’ to be a fluent speaker would be like asking the person to
walk the plank into a sea of nothingness. Being a fluent person has little or
no meaning compared with being someone who stutters. Similarly he redefines the
constructs of transitions. For example, Threat can be seen as the awareness
(e.g., a super-ordinate construction and anticipation about the construct
system) of an imminent comprehensive reduction of the total number of
predictive implications of the personal construct system. For me, all his
redefinitions brought Kelly’s theory to life. There are also ideas about change
that I have found very useful. For instance, change is more likely to occur on
those constructs that have a similar number of implications for each pole and
also on constructs that have few polar implications. Indexing the
implications of each pole of constructs will faci1itate differential predictions
with respect to the direction and ease of psychological reconstruction. I
took up his suggestion about using both poles of the constructs and I designed
a ‘bi-polar implications grid’ in my research with those who stutter (1972). I
wanted to have an idea of how easy it would be for a person to change. Early on
Don Bannister and I played around with the Impgrid and resistance to change
grid. I learned something important about myself. I had – perhaps still have –
an important construct to do with reliability. What I found was that
that construct was indeed the most resistant to change. But it had only 2 implications!
It looked ridiculous and we thought perhaps the procedure was at fault. Blaming
one’s tools is always an easy way out. But after a bit of introspection I could
see that the construct came from my childhood. My father was quite an old man
and an ex-army officer. He felt strongly that one should always be punctual. So
whenever he took his two children out to see friends we would always arrive a
few minutes early and then wait outside so we went in at the “right” time. That
was a construct I had failed to update into my middle age. There are some very
novel ideas Denny mentions. For instance he says: “The trans-contextual
identity of a construct can perhaps be defined as the points of identical subordinate
and superordinate implications. For example, if in context X, A, B, and C imply
honesty, and honesty implies 1,2, and 3 while in context Y, A, D, and E imply honesty,
and honesty implies 1, 4 and 5, then the trans-contextual identity of honesty
consists of A and 1. This definition is definitely a tentative one.” Tentative
indeed, but an intriguing one. Last, but by no means least, Denny Hinkle
provides 27 suggestions for further research on his theory of construct
implications.
| |
|
|
|
|
REFERENCE |
|
| Fransella, F. (1972) Personal change and
reconstruction. London: Academic Press
| |
| | |
|
Editors' note
This text was first published in Constructive Interventionist,
Vol. 42, February 2010, the newsletter of the Centre for Personal
Construct Psychology at the School of Psychology, University of
Hertfordshire, UK.
|
|
| | |
|
ABOUT
THE
AUTHOR
Fay Fransella, PhD FBPsS, is a Visiting Professor in
Personal Construct Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, Emeritus
Reader in Clinical Psychology at the University of London and a Personal
Construct Psychotherapist (retired). Her first publication describing work with
PCP was in 1966. Since then she has written and edited 14 books describing
personal construct theory and its methods and over 100 papers. In 1968 she gave
an early description of the use of ‘laddering’, a technique first described by
Hinkle in 1965. Her work applying personal construct theory and its methods to
help people overcome stuttering and to test out the theoretical assumption that
behaviour and construing are intimately related, was published in 1972. That
work also influenced the practice of speech and language therapy and was also a
deliberate attempt to test a major tenet of personal construct theory - the
Choice Corollary. In 1980 she founded the Centre for Personal Construct
Psychology in London. That is now part of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, and
has Nick Reed as its Director. She is now semi-retired but still very much involved in personal construct psychology
activities.
Email: ffransella@lambslane.eclipse.co.uk
Correspondence
address:
Prof Fay Fransella, Centre for Personal
Construct Psychology, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield,
Hertfordshire, AL10 9AB, UK.
|
|
|
|
|
|
REFERENCE
Fransella,
F. (2010). Introducing you to Dennis H. Hinkle.
Personal
Construct Theory & Practice, 7, Supplement No 1, iii-iv, 2010
(Retrieved
from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp10/fransella10.html)
|
|
|
|
|
|
Received: 10 Aug
2010 - Accepted: 12 Aug 2010 – Published 31 Aug 2010 |
|
|
|
|
|