Constructivist Psychotherapy

A Narrative Hermeneutic Approach

Gabriele Chiari, Maria Laura Nuzzo

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135239909
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: History & Theory in Psychology

Psychotherapy has undergone major changes in recent years, with a variety of new approaches including cognitive-behavioural therapy joining the more traditional and widespread schools of thought. These new approaches all share the epistemological assumption of constructivism, which states that there are alternative ways of looking at events and that we interpret events according to how we see the world.

Constructivist Psychotherapy reviews the constructivist trends in psychotherapy which link these new approaches, allowing the reader to enter an entirely new dialogue. The book traces constructivist thought, elaborating on Kelly's personal construct theory and the implications for psychotherapeutic theory and practice.

Areas of discussion include:

• the therapist's understanding of the client's narrative
• a constructivist understanding of the person
• psychological constructivism and constructivist trends in psychotherapy

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Setting constructivist psychotherapy within its therapeutic, social and philosophical context and using case studies throughout, the book revisits 'Kellian' ideas and theories, bringing them up to date, to explore what it is to be a constructivist psychotherapist today. As such this book will be of interest to all psychotherapists, as well as anyone with an interest in the psychotherapeutic field.

Chapter 1
Personal construct psychotherapy: forerunner of constructivist psychotherapies

Around the middle of the last century, Dr. George A.Kelly, a psychology teacher at the Ohio State University in Kansas, began to share, with about twenty colleagues on a weekly basis, hundreds of pages of notes he had been accumulating over the last twenty years. The original aim was to write a handbook of clinical procedures; but, when the author realised that the hows of clinical practice rested on many implicit basic assumptions taken for granted, he began coping with the necessity to explain the whys. When doing that, he discovered that ‘in the years of relatively isolated clinical practice we had wandered far off the beaten paths of psychology, much farther than we had ever suspected’ (Kelly, 1991a/1955, p. xi).

Much has been speculated about the reasons for Kelly’s ideas on psychology and psychotherapy, which were uncommon in those times (Fransella, 1995): the importance placed on the tendency of people to invent and create has been related to Kelly’s lonely childhood, being the only child of farming parents near Perth, Kansas (Rychlak, 1981); the emphasis on the human potential to live unconventionally, by bold experimentation rather than blind faith in authority, has been seen as the counterpoint to the religious ideology of his conservative Christian parents (Mair, 1985); the rigorous formal structure of personal construct theory and its more popular assessment technique, the repertory grid, have been supposed to derive from Kelly’s former degree in physics and mathematics (Fransella, 1983, 2000); his view of personal identity in terms of socially embedded roles, as well as the therapeutic use of techniques such as role-playing and fixed-role therapy, have been connected to his former coaching in dramatics and to his reading of Moreno, the founder of psychodrama (Rychlak, 1981).

However, after three years of discussions with the so-called ‘Thursday-nighters’, The Psychology of Personal Constructs was published in 1955. Two volumes with a total of 1218 pages, the first entitled A theory of personality, and the second devoted to Clinical diagnosis and psychotherapy. The book had some authoritative, on the whole flattering, reviews (Bruner, 1956; McArthur, 1956; Rogers, 1956), but in practice soon fell into oblivion. After all, how could such a weighty tome, with a preface like the following, be successful?

It is only fair to warn the reader about what may be in store for him. In the first place, he is likely to find missing most of the familiar landmarks of psychology books. For example, the term learning, so honourably embedded in most psychological texts, scarcely appears at all. That is wholly intentional; we are for throwing it overboard altogether. There is no ego, no emotion, no motivation, no reinforcement, no drive, no unconscious, no need. There are some words with brand-new psychological definitions, words like foci of convenience, preemption, propositionality, fixed-role therapy, creativity cycle, transitive diagnosis, and the credulous approach. Anxiety is defined in a special systematic way. Role, guilt and hostility carry definitions altogether unexpected by many; and, to make heresy complete, there is no extensive bibliography.

(Kelly, 1991a/1955, p. xii, italics in original)

What kind of reader could ever be interested in these upsetting ideas? Kelly himself gives the answer:

an adventuresome soul who is not one bit afraid of thinking unorthodox thoughts about people, who dares peer out at the world through the eyes of strangers, who has not invested beyond his means in either ideas or vocabulary, and who is looking for an ad interim, rather than an ultimate, set of psychological insights.

(1991a/1955, p. xii, italics in original)

Such readers had yet to come. For many years, the psychology of personal constructs was to survive in small groups of followers dispersed in few countries (Neimeyer, 1985). Furthermore, most of the literature quoting Kelly’s work has made use of forms of grid test (see section 4.4) in research and assessment, often with ‘no logical relation to the principles of personal construct theory’ (Adams-Webber, 1979, p. 20). Only with the spreading of psychological constructivism in the 1980s, was Kelly’s work finally to find adequate readership.

In this chapter we shall briefly outline the basics of personal construct theory, as well as its application to various fields of psychology, particularly psychotherapy. Readers already familiar with these topics can skip this part of the book. In Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 we shall elaborate and advance some of Kelly’s ideas by expounding our narrative hermeneutic interpretation of personal construct psychotherapy.

1.1 Personal construct theory

In our opinion, ‘personal construct theory not only has been the first constructivist theory of personality, but it is to date the only constructivist theory of personality and psychotherapy’ (Chiari & Nuzzo, 1996a, p. 27, italics in original).

By assuming that ‘all of our present interpretations of the universe are subject to revision or replacement’, Kelly (1991a/1955, p. 11, italics in the original) uncovers the basic philosophical root of his theoretical position. Kelly was aware that philosophical speculation is inescapable for any scientific investigation, and consequently he chose to state his underlying assumptions at the very beginning of his work. He did that by coining two expressions that—consistent with his theoretical formulation—are shaped like the contrasting poles of a discrimination, a construct: accumulative fragmentalism vs. constructive alternativism (Chiari & Nuzzo, 2003a).

According to the prevailing epistemological assumption of accumulative fragmentalism, knowledge derives from the gathering of fragmented facts, that is, truth is collected piece by piece. On the other hand, in the modern debate on the nature of knowledge, the idea that all facts are theory-laden is increasingly widely held, thanks in particular to Popper’s (1959/1934) and Kuhn’s (1962) criticism of the inductive view of science. Science proceeds by means of conjectures and refutations: any person, as a scientist, does the same, according to Kelly. But Kelly goes even further, taking the stand that there are always some alternative constructions available to choose from in dealing with the world: ‘No one needs to paint himself into a corner; no one needs to be completely hemmed in by circumstances; no one needs to be the victim of his biography’ (1991a/1955, p. 11). Constructive alternativism ‘leads one to regard a large accumulation of facts as an open invitation to some far-reaching reconstruction which will reduce them to a mass of trivialities’ (1970a/1966, p. 2). In other words, Kelly believes in the possibility of interpreting the world in many, equally legitimate ways, since:

we can no longer rest assured that human progress may proceed step by step in an orderly fashion from the known to the unknown. Neither our senses nor our doctrines provide us with the immediate knowledge required for such a philosophy of science. What we think we know is anchored only in our own assumptions, not in the bed rock of truth itself, and that world we seek to understand remains always on the horizons of our thoughts.

(1977/1963, pp. 5–6)

On the other hand:

to say that whatever exists can be reconstrued is by no manner or means to say that it makes no difference how it is construed. Quite the contrary. It often makes a world of difference. Some reconstructions may open fresh channels for a rich and productive life. Others may offer one no alternative save suicide.

(1969b/1958, p. 228)

1.1.1 The stance of anticipation: the fundamental postulate

Grounded in this philosophical stance, personal construct theory opens with a fundamental postulate: ‘a person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events’ (Kelly, 1991a/1955, p. 32).

The above is precisely a postulate, that is, an assumption, a tentative statement of truth to be meant as ‘let us suppose, for the sake of the discussion which is to follow, that…’. What would ensue if people’s processes were oriented by their ways to anticipate events?

The postulate represents the foundation for the whole theoretical building to follow. The person is the subject of the theory: ‘the individual person rather than any part of the person, any group of people, or any particular process manifested in the person’s behaviour’ (ibid, p. 33). The choice of the person as the subject of psychology could appear obvious, but is not considered so by many psychologists.

Currently many psychologists feel that psychology should concern itself more with ‘whole’ people. It should centre more on ‘real human experience’. This is comical in one sense—it is as if sailors suddenly decided they ought to take an interest in ships—but necessary in another. A variety of vanities have caused psychologists to turn their backs on the complete and purposeful person. A craving to be seen, above all, as scientists has led them to favour the clockwork doll, the chemical interaction or the environmentally imprisoned rat as their models of humanity.

(Bannister & Fransella, 1986, p. 1)

So, the person. And the person is presumed from the outset to be a process: ‘the person is not an object which is temporarily in a moving state but is himself a form of motion’ (Kelly, 1991a/1955, p. 33). One does not have to invoke any special notions (dynamics, drives, motivation or force) to explain why the object of psychology does not remain inert: as far as the theory is concerned, it is never inert.

The person’s processes are ‘channelized’: a metaphor suitable for indicating that they are structured, not ‘fluttering about’ (ibid., p. 34). And they are channelised by the ways in which the person anticipates events. Here is one of the most revolutionary features of personal construct theory. People are not moved by occurrences of the past, be it as victims of reinforcement schedules or as victims of their infancy. Nor do people aim at achieving a pre-established state of mind. Instead, they strive to give personal meanings to the world, and to move in the world checking out how that meaning allows them to anticipate it.

The well-known metaphor of ‘man-the-scientist’ (ibid., p. 4) illustrates efficiently both the philosophy of constructive alternativism and the fundamental postulate. Just like a scientist, any person poses questions about the nature of the universe, observes the world, builds structures of meaning, and, behaving on the basis of such interpretive hypotheses, experiments with them in order to organise their experience and anticipate events. In doing so, the person is regarded as an ‘inquiring man’, to the extent that:

construct theory sees man not as an infantile savage, nor as a just-cleverer-than-the-average-rat, nor as the victim of his biography, but as an inveterate inquirer, self-invented and shaped, sometimes wonderfully and sometimes disastrously, by the direction of his inquiries.

(Bannister & Fransella, 1986, p. vii)

It is thanks to this image of the person that the theory shows its reflexivity, that is, personal construct theory is a construction which is accounted for by personal construct theory.

One of the effects of this [treating scientists as persons and persons as scientists] is to make the model person of personal construct psychology look recognizable like you: that is, unless you are the very modest kind of person who sees themselves as the stimulus-jerked puppet of learning theory, the primitive infant of psychoanalytic theory or the perambulating telephone exchange of information theory.

(Ibid., p. 4)

In the formulation of the fundamental postulate, there is an apparently odd grammatical construction: the choice to use the adverb ‘psychologically’ rather than the adjective ‘psychological’ (‘a person’s processes are psychologically channelized…’ instead of ‘a person’s psychological processes are channelized…’). Of course, the choice is deliberate, and shows the consistency of Kelly’s ideas about constructive alternativism:

we do not conceive the substance of psychology to be itself psychological—or physiological, or sociological, or to be preempted by any system. A person’s processes are what they are; and psychology, physiology, or what have you, are simply systems concocted for trying to anticipate them. Thus, when we use the term psychologically, we mean that we are conceptualizing processes in a psychological manner, not that the processes are psychological rather than something else.

(Kelly, 1991a/1955, p. 33, italics in the original)

The following quotation appears to be effectively illustrative of what can be regarded also as a constructivist solution of the mind-body problem in terms of modes of constr...