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OBITUARY
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Trevor W. Butt
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1947 - 2015
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Trevor Butt in Brisbane, 2007
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Trevor Butt, who died in April this year at
the age of 67, was a major contributor to the field of Personal Construct
Psychology. He was born in Hornchurch, Essex and gained his first degree in psychology
from Leeds University in 1970. He then went on to complete his post graduate
training in clinical psychology, also at Leeds, in 1972. Subsequently he was
employed as a clinical psychologist at Lynfield Mount Hospital in Bradford.
During his work there he became interested in social skills training. His
theoretical approach had been behaviourist, but he became increasingly
dissatisfied with this and began to move toward a more cognitive behaviourist
framework as this seemed to offer more scope to work with the client’s own
systems of meaning-making.
It was around this time that Trevor met Don
Bannister, who later became a close friend and mentor. Don had relocated from
Bexley Hospital in Kent to High Royds Hospital in the Leeds-Bradford area and
gathered around himself a group of young clinical psychologists, several of
whom have gone on to publish in the personal construct area including Richard
'Chuck' Butler, David Green, and Trevor. There can be little doubt about the
enormous influence that Don Bannister had upon Trevor’s work. Although he did
not remain in full time clinical practice, taking up a positon as senior
lecturer in psychology at the (then) Huddersfield Polytechnic, Trevor
maintained his commitment to the use and development of PCP theory and methods,
both in teaching and research. He attended his first PCP congress in 1985, and
soon became a regular presenter at both European and international conferences.
When Viv Burr joined the department at
Huddersfield in 1983, they quickly found common intellectual ground, and
another life-long friendship was formed. Together they began writing from a
constructive perspective. Their first joint publication (Burr & Butt, 1989)
applied a constructivist approach to the phenomenon of hypnosis, which Viv had studied
as a doctoral student. They subsequently presented a paper at what was to be
the first EPCA conference in York in 1992. Although they collaborated on a
number of publications over the years, perhaps their most significant joint
output is their book An Invitation to
Personal Construct Psychology (Burr and Butt, 1992), which aimed to bring
the spirit of PCP ideas to a non-specialist audience. Trevor was largely
responsible for updating and extending the book for a second edition (Butt and
Burr, 2004).
The number and quality of Trevor’s
publications in PCP by the mid 1990s were such that he was able to gain a PhD
by publication, which was examined by Phillida Salmon in 1998. Trevor’s
interest in research and writing, always from a constructivist standpoint,
continued to flourish and he was awarded the title of Reader in 1999. He was Chair of the British
Psychological Society's Psychotherapy Section in 2001, and took a lead role in organizing several PCP conferences, including the
2003 International Congress. He was a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology from
2004 and a founding co-editor of the on-line journal Personal Construct Theory & Practice from 2004.
Trevor’s frustration with prevailing models
of personality contributed to a major project in the form of his book Understanding People (2004).
Here, he aimed to challenge the agenda of mainstream psychology, which he
argued was focussed on attempting to ‘explain’ human behaviour using the
concept of causality borrowed from the natural sciences. He proposed instead
that we should be aim for ‘understanding’. Understanding comes when we see
behaviour or experience in its context, and when we gain insight into what the
person sees as the reasons for (not causes of) their conduct, and is essential
in the project of helping people to change. The book reviews models of the
person from all the major perspectives within psychology, such as trait theory,
cognitivism and psychoanalysis, as well as the social constructionist critique
of these, in Trevor’s characteristic clear and accessible style. It then puts
forward an alternative conception, broadly termed an ‘existential
phenomenological’ approach, which draws on PCP in offering a more
constructivist conceptualisation of the person. His commitment to constructive
alternativism as a central tenet in understanding people also led Trevor into
collaborations with academics outside of PCP, most notably in the area of alternative
sexualities, where he co-authored publications with Jeff Hearn (University of
Helsinki) and Darren Langdridge (the Open University).
As part of his desire to place PCP in its
intellectual context and extend its theoretical framework, Trevor developed a
strong interest in philosophy, notably phenomenology and pragmatism, becoming
an active member of the
BPS Section on History and Philosophy. Among his numerous publications (he published 3 books, 20 book
Chapters and 30 journal articles) are papers on the relevance of both
phenomenology and pragmatism to PCP. Only four years after the publication of Understanding People he published
another major contribution, his book George
Kelly (2008). This was written as part of Palgrave’s ‘Mind Shapers’ series,
which documents the work of key psychologists and their impact on the
discipline. In keeping with Trevor’s developing interest in pragmatism and his
view of its relevance to PCP, the book, which is dedicated to the memory of Don
Bannister, adopts a pragmatist perspective, demonstrating Trevor’s familiarity
with the works of Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead. Trevor’s other notable
contributions to the development of PCP theory include two publications (Butt,
1995; 2007) on the technique of laddering, in which he critiqued the concept of
the hierarchical organisation of constructs, and a phenomenologically informed
interpretation of elaborative choice (Butt, 1998).
Trevor’s vision of PCP was fundamentally a
social one. He maintained, as did Kelly, that our constructions are not private
accomplishments; they are made in relation with others, in the context of a
social world. The importance of the social world for understanding people
gained particular focus among social psychologists in the form of the body of
theory and research that has come to be known as social constructionism. Social
constructionism appears to hold several key assumptions in common with PCP. However,
Trevor felt that social constructionism’s exclusive focus on language
ultimately constituted a form of idealism and threatened to neglect important
features of personal experience, such as selfhood. This concern culminated in
two publications (Butt, Burr and Bell, 1997; Butt, 1999), respectively arguing
for a sense of self that is both fragmented (in line with social
constructionist theory) and an important organising narrative in our
subjectivity, and for a way of understanding emotions that is neither realist
nor idealist.
Although his contributions to the
theoretical development of PCP have been significant, Trevor was also keen to
use and to promote the use of PCP methods in research, especially qualitative
work. An early collaboration with Viv (Burr and Butt, 1996) was a presentation
at the EPCA conference in Reading, UK, outlining what Trevor termed the
‘Kellian interview’. This approach to interviewing incorporated a number of PCP
ideas, doubtless influenced by Trevor’s experience in clinical psychology,
aimed at quickly gaining access to important features of the person’s
experience; for example, the use of contrasts involving real events, and
contrasts between the person’s anticipated experience and the actuality. A more
recent collaboration disseminated the benefits of various PCP methods for
qualitative research to a non-PCP audience (Burr, King and Butt, 2012). Trevor
also recently collaborated on a qualitative research project exploring
inter-cultural construing (Burr, Giliberto and Butt, 2014). These ‘Kellian’
interviews were used to explore how English and Italian people construe each
other.
Trevor retired from Huddersfield in 2007 as
Emeritus Reader to concentrate further on his writing and his family, including
his two young granddaughters whom he adored. He continued writing and
discussing his ideas with academic friends, especially Rue Cromwell, until the
week before his death.
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REFERENCES |
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Burr, V.
& Butt, T.W. (1989) A construct theory formulation of hypnosis. British
Journal of Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis 6, 85-90.
Burr, V.
& Butt, T. W. (1992 ) Invitation to personal construct psychology London: Whurr. Second Edition Butt & Burr
(2004).
Burr, V. &
Butt, T.W. (1994). The person in social constructionism. Paper presented at the
British Psychological Society Social Psychology Annual Conference, Cambridge.
Burr, V.
& Butt, T.W. (1996) The Kellian interview. Paper presented to the EPCA
conference, Reading, UK.
Burr, V.,
Gilberto, M. & Butt, T. (2014) Construing the cultural other and the self:
A Personal Construct analysis of English and Italian perceptions of national
character. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 39, 53-65.
Burr, V.,
King, N. & Butt, T. (2012) Personal construct psychology methods for
qualitative research. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 17
(4), 341-355.
Butt, T.
(1995) The ordinal relationship between constructs. Journal of Constructivist
Psychology 8: 227-236. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10720539508410805
Butt, T. W.
(1998) Sedimentation and elaborative choice. Journal of Constructivist
Psychology 11, (4) 265-281.
Butt, T. W.
(1999) Realism, constructionism and phenomenology. In D. Nightingale & J.
Crombie (Eds.), Social constructionist psychology: a critical analysis of
theory and practice. (pp. 127-140). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Butt, T. W.
(2004) Understanding people. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Butt, T. W.
(2007). Personal construct theory and method: another look at laddering. Personal
Construct Theory & Practice, 4, 11-14.
http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp07/butt07.pdf
Butt, T. W.
(2008) George Kelly and the psychology of personal constructs Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan
Butt, T.W.,
Burr, V., & Bell, R. (1997). Fragmentation and the sense of self. Constructivism
in the Human Sciences, 2, 12-29.
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Viv Burr
University of Huddersfield
Queensgate,
Huddersfield, HD1 3DH
UK
Email: v.burr@hud.ac.uk
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Richard Bell
School of Psychological Sciences University of Melbourne
Melbourne,
Australia
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REFERENCE
Burr, V., Bell, R. C. (2015). Trevor Butt 1947 - 2015.
Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 12, 34-36, 2015
(Retrieved from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp15/burr-butt15.html)
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Received: 18 June 2015 – Accepted: 21 June 2015 –
Published: 21 June 2015
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Photos: Jörn Scheer
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