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BOOK REVIEW |
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PERSONAL
CONSTRUCT PSYCHOLOGY IN AN ACCELERATING WORLD
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Dušan Stojnov, Vladimir Džinović, Jelena Pavlović, and Mary Frances (Eds.) |
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Belgrade: Serbian
Constructivist Association/EPCA Publications, 2010, Paperback, 230 pages,
£15, €20 |
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reviewed by
Peter Cummins |
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Coventry, UK |
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As I have got
older and more experienced,
cynical, and realistic, I attend conferences in the hope that in a
“good”
conference there will be two or three presentations that I will still
be
thinking about in the weeks after the conference. More than that is a
bonus!
The Belgrade conference,
which I was at,
more than met the above criteria. As Stojnov says in his preface: This
book
“emerges from that conference”.
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| Dušan Stojnov |
Vladimir Džinović |
Jelena Pavlović |
Mary Frances |
I was beginning to think
about writing this
review when I had unsolicited assistance. I was sitting at a cafe
table, and
had left a copy of the book on the table beside me. An elderly (that
is, older
than I am!) man and his wife sat down at the same table. He asked me
what the
book was. I gave it to him to see for himself, anticipating the common
response,
(which would be to take a quick look and hand it back with an
embarrassed
comment that the person doesn’t know much about psychology). My
anticipation
was completely wrong. He began to read it, and then began to take
notes! He
spent at least 30 minutes speed reading various sections of the book
and making
detailed notes. When he gave it back he told me that he was a retired
driving
instructor who was about to start a 10 week course in philosophy (at
the
university of the third age [an educational charity]) the following
day. He had
found the conference book very stimulating. He was particularly pleased
with
how easy it was to read, and how many ideas he had got from it that he
could
take to his first philosophy class.
So there you have a
completely unbiased
review... this is an easy to read, stimulating and thought provoking
book.
The book is divided into
three sections, on
theory, on practice and on method.
The first section is
dominated by what may
be one of the last published papers of Miller Mair. In
this he summarises his
work as being “a search for understanding in which psychological and
spiritual
inquiry can be seen as close cousins to each other”. He finishes with
the sentence,
clarifying the psychology that he is reaching towards, as “a psychology
of
relational knowing in which WHO we are and HOW we engage in meeting may
move us
a step further towards gentleness and kindness along the way”. It is
hard to
read this chapter without experiencing a keen sense of loss, as a
result of his
sudden death the year after this was written.
Harry
Procter illuminates the “roots of Kellian notions in
Philosophy”, going back to
Kant, Hegel, and following on to the American pragmatist philosophy as
represented by C. S. Peirce. I especially welcome the inclusion of this
chapter,
the spoken version of which I attended at the conference, as only
through reading
the printed text can its intellectual wealth be properly appreciated.
In the next paper, Simone Cheli and Francesco
Velicogna explore the roots of constructivism and delve
even deeper in history,
claiming Giambattista Vico as a source of inspiration. To conclude this
section
there is a chapter by Bernadette
O’Sullivan. She is drawn to the idea of
“psychology as storytelling”, a concept developed by Miller Mair, and
discusses
it with respect to the cycle of experience. She “tells the story” of
her role
as a supervisor of teams caring for the Irish “Traveller Community”. I
thought
this chapter, which is a very interesting use of Kelly’s cycle of
experience in
an applied context, sits slightly uneasily in a theoretical section: it
is much
more a reflection on practice (which is the title of the next section).
In this
chapter O’Sullivan tells us that she will “summarise ... my own
participation
in the Traveller community project that I have briefly described in
footnote 4
above.” There is no footnote 4. There is a previous summary in footnote
two; I
was left uncertain as to whether this was the summary being drawn on,
or
whether there was a missing footnote 4! The issues that she describes
have a
very topical resonance for the British context, where the difficulties
between
the traveller community and the general population have been very high
profile
in the recent past.
In the opening chapter of
the second
section Karin Buzzegoli
et al. challenge the classification of PCP in many
psychology textbooks as “just another cognitive psychology”, pointing
to the
treatment of human feelings in a very different way from the usual
academic approach.
PCP has been most
elaborated in the context
of psychotherapy and in the next chapter Simona Colombari et al.
illustrate how
the points made in the previous chapter (by Buzzegoli et al.)
relate to the
therapeutic situation by giving voice to clients undergoing change in
therapy,
with “feelings” replacing the standard term “emotions”. – While many
readers
will be familiar with standard therapeutic situations it is hardly
imaginable
what David Winter et al.
report from Sierra Leone, a country torn apart in a
devastating civil war full of atrocities. Obviously, familiar ways of
looking
at mental illness are not applicable in a country with only one
psychiatrist
and two psychiatric nurses in the mental health service, with many
patients
being chained as it was common in Europe 200 years ago, but the authors
show
how a personal construct approach may, very tentatively, open up
perspectives
of a change for the better. – On a very different note, Stephen Denner-Stewart
et al. analyse the fact that in a “disease” now quite
common in the “developed”
world, ADHD, boys are four times as likely as girls to be affected. The
chapter
recounts a particularly interesting case of “ADHD” and uses drawings,
within Procter’s
PEG grids, to look at son and father's construing of themselves and
others,
looking at the father's extreme authoritarian attitude and gender
construing
and elaborating how this construing is highly relevant to the son's
problem. The
section ends with a paper by
Ian Gillman-Smith describing the difficulties a
constructivist approach encounters in the British NHS which is
dominated by the
cognitive-behaviourist paradigm. As the domination of CBT is not unique
to
Britain, the situation he describes may resonate with other non British
clinicians.
In the third section Jelena Pavlović and
Dušan
Stojnov propose, based on an analysis of the theory, that
what Personal
Construct Psychotherapy was for the Twentieth century, Personal
Construct Coaching
may become for the “learning society” of the Twenty-first. – Vladimir Džinović
finds
that Personal Construct Theory
provides helpful tools applicable in the
professional development of teachers. – Harun Simsek
provides empirical
evidence for the usefulness of PCP in teacher training, with teachers
of
English in Turkey, by exploring teachers’ implicit theories of
teaching, as a
way of assisting them to avoid stress and burnout. – Laura Balzani et al. put
the theory to an interesting test by applying personal construct
principles to
the teaching of PC therapy itself, thus demonstrating the inherent
reflexivity
power of the theory. – Another example of using PCP in the professional
field
is given by Milica
Vukelić and Nataša
Cvijan in the analysis of CVs submitted
by job-seeking people.
In the final
section, two chapters provide
variations of established techniques used in PCP. – Dušan Stojnov and Ljubomir
Savanović suggest an improved version of the classical
“Pyramiding” technique
devised by Landfield, and Miroslav
Filip, returning to Bannister’s early
studies of the construction processes of schizophrenic patients,
proposes a
non-verbal grid procedure termed the “Semantic Selection Test”.
Like
all books based on conference proceedings this volume sometimes suffers
from
the heterogeneity of the topics covered. In fact, not all of the
chapters may
appeal to all potential readers. Inevitably they vary in quality, from
the
“would have been published in peer reviewed journals” to “would only
have been
published within a book of conference proceedings”. The majority of
papers are
by people who have not previously published in the PCP literature. But
the real
value of this book is that it is a revelation of what is actually
happening in
the world of PCP practitioners, far removed from what makes it through
the
normal peer reviewed publication process.
This book is an interesting
mixture of the
general and the specific. Researchers (and practitioners) might get
inspiration
from the various examples of empirical research and professional
practice,
because PCP is not so much focused on certain specific areas of
research but
provides techniques and concepts applicable in quite different settings
of
research and practice.
The book demonstrates a
lively use of PCP
approaches and techniques, including the cycle of experience
(O’Sullivan,
Balzani et al.), PEG grids (Stewart, Džinović, Vukelić &
Cvijan), Kelly’s
corollaries (Simsek), Rep grids (Winter et al., Filip), ABC’s (Winter
et al.), Constructs
of transition (Buzzegoli et al.), narrative analysis (Vukelić &
Cvijan),
Pyramiding (Stojnov & Savanović) and loosening and tightening
(Filip).
I think that anyone
interested in PCP will
find at least the three things to think about that I describe at the
beginning
of this review.
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ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
 Peter Cummins graduated
in Psychology in 1973 from the National University of Ireland
(University College, Dublin). He was Consultant Clinical Psychologist
and Head
of Adult Psychological Services for Coventry Primary Care Trust and
works now
in private practice. He is also an honorary Teaching Fellow at Coventry
University. His professional interests are the psychology of personal
constructs and anger management.
E-mail:
pac52@btinternet.com
Correspondence:
Peter Cummins,
Clarendon Practice, 44 Park Road, Coventry, CV1 2LD, UK
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REFERENCE
Cummins, P.
(2012). Review
of Personal
construct psychology in an accelerating world, edited by D.
Stojnov, V. Džinoviċ, J. Pavloviċ, & M. Frances.
Personal
Construct Theory & Practice, 9, 1-3, 2012
(Retrieved from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp12/cummins-stojnov12.html)
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Received: 25 Jan
2012 – Accepted: 25 Jan 2012 –
Published: 15 March 2012
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