Although George
Kelly’s approach to the human condition,
the Psychology
of Personal Constructs, seems to focus on the individual
and on
the meaning that individuals attach to what they experience around
them, the
social and societal implications of his theory have not gone unnoticed.
Individuals
live among other individuals, deal with others, communicate, share food
and
constructs with others, cannot survive without others. What begins at
the group
level extends to society. Obviously, individuals are shaped by society,
but
they are also shapers and authors of their fate – and of the fate of
others.
In
1961, Kelly famously travelled around the world, not as a tourist but
with the
aim of exploring people’s views about crucial issues they and their
countries were
facing. He thus laid the ground for applying personal construct theory
to
political issues, at a time when tensions between the so-called First
and Second Worlds were at their peak – it was the
year the Berlin Wall was erected. Don
Bannister, one of the founding
sons of
PCP, recalled a somewhat cryptic remark by Kelly that he “opted for
politics”
when considering “where we would like personal construct theory to go
in an
elaborative sense” (Bannister, 2003, p. 181). Twenty years later (in
1981),
Bannister
himself contributed to this elaboration in a seminal paper that was
published
only in 2003. The number of papers addressing the use of PCP with
regard to
politics have not been many, though. That the South African Peter Du Preez in
the 1970s,
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
from Israel, Dušan
Stojnov from Yugoslavia (now Serbia) and Jörn
Scheer in Germany in the 1990s
are among them is probably not accidental. The
construction of group realities. – Culture, society, and personal
construct
theory (edited by Kalekin-Fishman and Walker in 1996) and Crossing borders –
going places. – Personal constructions of
otherness (edited by Scheer in 2003) bear witness to this
development.
That
‘great men’ shape history is probably as true as it is simplistic. But,
as
Fay Fransella (2003) quotes the historian David Gillard, “we can assume
that
foreign policy consists of the construing by a small number of
identifiable
individuals of the behaviour of their counterparts in other states.
This they
do through identifying their opponents’ personal constructs and trying
to
change or reinforce them by a wide choice of methods, which can range
from
intimate discussion to total war.” (p. 450) Psychoanalysts have already
analysed notorious evil-doers in history and the discipline of
political
psychology has been around for quite a while. It
is probably not surprising that some social constructionists have
discovered
international politics, although it may be new to the reader that
“constructivism has become one of the major theories in the field of
international relations” (as a Wikipedia
entry posits).
We believe however that the theory of personal constructs can
contribute to a
better understanding of what's going on in politics - not just
international relations, world peace, globalisation and the like.
Because politics and political involvement start next door. Or rather
behind our own door. Why do some
people get involved in politics and others don't, how do workers and
managers construe the same issues, what kind of constructs are at the
bottom of xenophobia, solidarity, prejudice, reconciliation - there
seems to be an infinite number of highly important issues that personal
construct theory might be able to shed some light on.
The satellite images on the preceding page
show two different "constructions" of the earth: the lower one is THE
EARTH as we know it from our world maps, the upper one (also on the title page), taken at night, shows where the
light is, in other words the centres of energy consumption - a
beautiful sight with eminently political implications - - -
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