The Psychology of Personal Constructs

Volume One: Theory and Personality

George Kelly

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134957422
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

First published in 1992. Unavailable for many years this is a reissue of George Kelly's classic work. It is the bible of personal construct psychology written by its founder. The first volume presents the theory of personal construct psychology.

Chapter one Constructive alternativism

DOI: 10.4324/9780203405970-1

In this chapter, instead of starting immediately with a statement of our theoretical position, we reach back to uncover some of its philosophical roots. Constructive alternativism not only underlies our theory, but it is also an explicit and recurrent theme throughout our later discussion of psychotherapeutic techniques.

A Points of departure

1 Perspectives on man

This theory of personality actually started with the combination of two simple notions: first, that man might be better understood if he were viewed in the perspective of the centuries rather than in the flicker of passing moments; and second, that each man contemplates in his own personal way the stream of events upon which he finds himself so swiftly borne. Perhaps within this interplay of the durable and the ephemeral we may discover ever more hopeful ways in which the individual man can restructure his life. The idea seems worth pursuing.

Neither the notion of man’s march through the centuries nor that of his personally biased nature is especially new. The successive literature of the Old Testament portrays a well-known epic story of man’s progress. Nor has the stream of the individual man’s life escaped the attention of curious students. The highly articulate William James was fascinated by the currents and eddies in the stream of consciousness. The inarticulate Adolph Meyer urged his students to draw a time line through the facts in their patients’ lives. The sensitive Sigmund Freud waded into the headwaters of the stream in a search for the underground springs which fed it. And the impulsive Henri Bergson jumped from the bank into the current and, as he was carried along, speculated that mind could be used as a yardstick for measuring time. As for personal ways of looking at things: Solomon, in writing about the worried man, said, ‘As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.’ And Shelley once wrote, ‘The mind becomes that which it contemplates.’ John Locke, struck by the unique imperceptiveness of each of his friends during an evening’s discussion, sat down to write the Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding before retiring for the night—a task which, incidentally, he did not finish until twenty years later,

The long-range view of man leads us to turn our attention towards those factors appearing to account for his progress rather than those betraying his impulses. To a large degree—though not entirely—the blueprint of human progress has been given the label of ‘science’. Let us then, instead of occupying ourselves with man-the-biological-organism or man-the-lucky-guy, have a look at man-the-scientist.

At this point we depart again from the usual manner of looking at things. When we speak of man-the-scientist we are speaking of all mankind and not merely a particular class of men who have publicly attained the stature of ‘scientists’. We are speaking of all mankind in its scientist-like aspects, rather than all mankind in its biological aspects or all mankind in its appetitive aspects. Moreover, we are speaking of aspects of mankind rather than collections of men. Thus the notion of man-the-scientist is a particular abstraction of all mankind and not a concrete classification of particular men.

Such an abstraction of the nature of man is not altogether new. The Reformation called attention to the priesthood of all men in contrast to the concretistic classification of certain men only as priests. The democratic political inventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hinged on the notion of the inherent rulership of all men in contrast to the older notion of a concrete class of rulers. In a similar fashion we may replace the concretistic notion of scientists being set apart from nonscientists and, like the reformists who insisted that every man is his own priest, propose that every man is, in his own particular way, a scientist.

Let us see what it would mean to construe man in his scientist-like aspect. What is it that is supposed to characterize the motivation of the scientist? It is customary to say that the scientist’s ultimate aim is to predict and control. This is a summary statement that psychologists frequently like to quote in characterizing their own aspirations. Yet, curiously enough, psychologists rarely credit the human subjects in their experiments with having similar aspirations. It is as though the psychologist were saying to himself:

I, being a psychologist, and therefore a scientist, am performing this experiment in order to improve the prediction and control of certain human phenomena; but my subject, being merely a human organism, is obviously propelled by inexorable drives welling up within him, or else he is in gluttonous pursuit of sustenance and shelter.

Now what would happen if we were to reopen the question of human motivation and use our long-range view of man to infer just what it is that sets the course of his endeavour? Would we see his centuried progress in terms of appetites, tissue needs, or sex impulses? Or might he, in this perspective, show a massive drift of quite a different sort? Might not the individual man, each in his own personal way, assume more of the stature of a scientist, ever seeking to predict and control the course of events with which he is involved? Would he not have his theories, testhis hypotheses, and weigh his experimental evidence? And, if so, might not the differences between the personal viewpoints of different men correspond to the differences between the theoretical points of view of different scientists?

Here is an intriguing idea. It stems from an attempt to consolidate the viewpoints of the clinician, the historian, the scientist, and the philosopher. But where does it lead? For considerable time now some of us have been attempting to discover the answer to this question. The present manuscript is a report of what has appeared on our horizons thus far.

2 What kind of universe?

All thinking is based, in part, on prior convictions. A complete philosophical or scientific system attempts to make all these prior convictions explicit. That is a large order, and there are few, if any, writers who can actually fill it. While we have no intention of trying to build a complete system at this point, it does seem to be incumbent upon us to attempt to be explicit about some of our more important prior convictions. The first of these convictions has to do with the kind of universe we envision.

We presume that the universe is really existing and that man is gradually coming to understand it. By taking this position we attempt to make clear from the outset that it is a real world we shall be talking about, not a world composed solely of the flitting shadows of people’s thoughts. But we should like, furthermore, to make clear our conviction that people’s thoughts also really exist, though the correspondence between what people really think exists and what really does exist is a continually changing one.

The universe that we presume exists has another important characteristic: it is integral. By that we mean it functions as a single unit with all its imaginable parts having an exact relationship to each other. This may, at first, seem a little implausible, since ordinarily it would appear that there is a closer relationship between the motion of my fingers and the action of the typewriter keys than there is, say, between either of them and the price of yak milk in Tibet. But we believe that, in the long run, all of these events—the motion of my fingers, the action of the keys, and the price of yak milk—are interlocked. It is only within a limited section of the universe, that part we call earth and that span of time we recognize as our present eon, that two of these necessarily seem more closely related to each other than either of them is to the third. A simple way of saying this is to state that time provides the ultimate bond in all relationships.

We can express the same idea through extrapolation from a well-known mathematical relationship. Consider the coefficient of correlation between two variables. If that coefficient is anything but zero and if it expresses a linear relationship, then an infinite increase in the variance of one of the variables will cause the coefficient to approach unity as a limit. The magnitude of the coefficient of correlation is therefore directly proportional to the breadth of perspective inwhich we envision the variables whose relationship it expresses. This is basically true of all relationships within our universe.

Another important prior conviction is that the universe can be measured along a dimension of time. This is a way of saying that the universe is continually changing with respect to itself. Since time is the one dimension which must always be considered if we are to contemplate change, we have chosen this particular way of saying that within our universe something is always going on. In fact, that is the way the universe exists; it exists by happening. Actually we tried to convey the same notion when we said in an earlier paragraph that the universe is really existing. Indeed, every day and all day it goes about its business of existing. It is hard to imagine what the world would be like if it just sat there and did nothing. Philosophers used to try to contemplate such a world, but, somehow, they never got very far with it.

The three prior convictions about the universe that we have emphasized in this section are that it is real and not a figment of our imaginations, that it all works together like clockwork, and that it is something that is going on all the time and not something that merely stays put.

3 What is life?

There are some parts of the universe which make a good deal of sense even when they are not viewed in the perspective of time. But there are other parts which make sense only when they are plotted along a time line. Life is one of the latter. This is a point about which we shall have a great deal to say later when we talk about ways to reconstruct personal lives. Whether it be the research-minded psychologist or the frantic client in the psychological clinic, life has to be seen in the perspective of time if it is to make any sense at all.

But life, to our way of thinking, is more than mere change. It involves an interesting relationship between parts of our universe wherein one part, the living creature, is able to bring himself around to represent another part, his environment. Sometimes it is said that the living thing is ‘sensitive’, in contrast to the nonliving thing, or that he is capable of ‘reaction’. This is roughly the same distinctive characteristic of life that we envision. But we like our formulation better because it emphasizes the creative capacity of the living thing to represent the environment, not merely to respond to it. Because he can represent his environment, he can place alternative constructions upon it and, indeed, do something about it if it doesn’t suit him. To the living creature, then, the universe is real, but it is not inexorable unless he chooses to construe it that way.

In emphasizing the prior conviction that life involves the representation or construction of reality, we should not imply that life is not itself real. Sometimes scientists, particularly those who are engrossed in the study of physical systems, take the stand that psychological events are not true phenomena but are rather epiphenomena, or merely the unreliable shadows of real events. This position is not ours. A person may misrepresent a real phenomenon, such as his income or his ills, and yet his misrepresentation will itself be entirely real. This applies even to the badly deluded patient: what he perceives may not exist, but his perception does. Moreover, his fictitious perception will often turn out to be a grossly distorted construction of something which actually does exist. Any living creature, together with his perceptions, is a part of the real world; he is not merely a near-sighted bystander to the goings-on of the real world.

Life, then, to our way of thinking, is characterized by its essential measurability in the dimension of time and its capacity to represent other forms of reality, while still retaining its own form of reality.

4 Construction systems

Man looks at his world through transparent patterns or templets which he creates and then attempts to fit over the realities of which the world is composed. The fit is not always very good. Yet without such patterns the world appears to be such an undifferentiated homogeneity that man is unable to make any sense out of it. Even a poor fit is more helpful to him than nothing at all.

Let us give the name constructs to these patterns that are tentatively tried on for size. They are ways of construing the world. They are what enables man, and lower animals too, to chart a course of behaviour, explicitly formulated or implicitly acted out, verbally expressed or utterly inarticulate, consistent with other courses of behaviour or inconsistent with them, intellectually reasoned or vegetatively sensed.

In general man seeks to improve his constructs by increasing his repertory, by altering them to provide better fits, and by subsuming them with superordinate constructs or systems. In seeking improvement he is repeatedly halted by the damage to the system that apparently will result from the alteration of a subordinate construct. Frequently his personal investment in the larger system, or his personal dependence upon it, is so great that he will forego the adoption of a more precise construct in the substructure. It may take a major act of psychotherapy or experience to get him to adjust his construction system to the point where the new and more precise construct can be incorporated.

Those construction systems which can be communicated can be widely shared. The last half century has shown much progress in the development of ways of making personal constructs and construction systems more communicable. We have developed a scientific psychological vocabulary. A better way of saying this is that our public construction systems for understanding other people’s personal constructs are becoming more precise and more comprehensive.

Certain widely shared or public construction systems are designed primarily to fit special fields or realms of facts. When one limits the realm of facts, it is possible to develop a detailed system without worrying about the inconsistencies in the system which certain peripheral facts would reveal. We limit the realm and try to ignore, for the time being, the intransigent facts just outside the borders of that realm. For example, it has long been customary and convenient to distinguish between ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ facts. These are two artificially distinguishedrealms, to which two types of construction systems are respectively fitted: the psychological construction system and the natural-science group of construction systems. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that we have on our hands two alternative construction systems, which can both be applied profitably to an ever increasing body of the same facts. The realms overlap.

Consider more specifically the realms of psychology and physiology. These realms have been given tentative boundaries based upon the presumed ranges of convenience of the psychological and the physiological construction systems, respectively. But many of the same facts can be construed within either system. Are those facts ‘psychological facts’ or are they ‘physiological facts’? Where do they really belong? Who gets possession of them, the psychologist or the physiologist? While this may seem like a silly question, one has only to sit in certain interdisciplinary staff conferences to see it arise in the discussions between people of different professional guilds. Some individuals can get badly worked up over the protection of their exclusive rights to construe particular facts.

The answer is, of course, that the events upon which facts are based hold no institutional loyalties. They are in the public domain. The same event may be construed simultaneously and profitably within various disciplinary systems—physics, physiology, political science, or psychology.

No one has yet proved himself wise enough to propound a universal system of constructs. We can safely assume that it will be a long time before a satisfactorily unified system will be proposed. For the time being we shall have to content ourselves with a series of miniature systems, each with its own realm or limited range of convenience. As long as we continue to use such a disjointed combination of miniature systems we shall have to be careful to apply each system abstractly rather than concretively. For example, instead of saying that a certain event is a ‘psychological event and therefore not a physiological event’, we must be careful to recognize that any event may be viewed either in its psychological or in its physiological aspects. A further idea that we must keep straight is that the physiologically constructed facts about that event are the offspring of the physiological system within which they emerge and have meaning, and that a psychological system is not obliged to account for them.

It is also important that we continue to recognize the limited ranges of convenience of our miniature systems. It is always tempting, once a miniature system has proved itself useful within a limited range of convenience, to try to extend its range of convenience. For example, in the field of psychology we have seen Hull’s mathematico-deductive theory of rote learning extended to the realm of problem solving or even to the realm of personality. Freud’s psychoanalysis started out as a psychotherapeutic technique but was progressively enlarged into a personality system and, by some, into a religio-philosophical system. This kind of inflation of miniature systems is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does cause trouble when one fails to recognize that what is reasonably true within a limited range is not necessarily quite so true outside that range.

Any psychological system is likely to have a limited range of convenience. In fact, psychological systems may, for some time...