CONSTRUCTIVIST PSYCHOLOGY |
We are neurologically wired to classify our experiences and to transform the buzzing, booming confusion of sensation into some codifed and dynamic representation of the world. [Mahoney 1982]
First I mention a few of the key figures. Constructivism began with Vico [1710] who pointed out the obvious: that the only possible knowledge we can have is about what we construe. Kant came at the same thing in a different way when he said that the mind's activity proceeds so that it gains knowledge of objects [it construes] and we call that knowledge experience. Then we have Schrodinger who goes further to tell us that every man's world picture is, and always remains, a construct of his mind, and cannot be proved to have any other existence. By contrast, traditional realist views about knowing hold that there is a reality that we can take in as knowledge, and that knowledge and reality can match or correspond.
Constructivists counter this by saying that knowledge arises only out of personally-adapted reality. There may be a good or bad fit between knowledge and reality, but there cannot be any match because we know things only subjectively, not objectively. On this view knowledge can be seen not as true/valid or false, but simply as more or less useful/viable.
As people have no access to a complete external reality, being human entails making an active effort to interpret experience by seeking purpose and significance in events - creating personal meanings - so as to understand the world and operate in it. A person's assimilating consciousness constructs regularities in the light of personal goals and intentions.
Because people construe and create their personal realities, knowledge is not simply a result of passive receiving, it is a product of recursive activity involving memory. Our personal intelligence organises the world we experience. Because those understandings are context-specific and selective, they are necessarily limited. This is because comparison establishes a sameness or difference which is limited by the criteria chosen by the person.
However, the obstacles people meet are usually ascribed to an objective world rather than to the person's operating errors. That is where constructivist psychotherapy comes in. I use two main constructivist sources.
The most developed constructivist psychology is the Personal Construct Theory [PCT] assembled by George Kelly in the 1950s. Having been trained in PCT I see it as the main foundation of my work.
Kelly's view is that whatever the objective reality of a thing may be, people will give it as many meanings or interpretations "as our wits enable us to contrive" - that is construing. By construing he means thinking and feeling taken together as a basis for actively making discriminations. Our constructs are the basis for hypotheses we make about the world that we use to handle whatever life brings. Although we may not recognise it, there are always alternative ways to construe things, hence the possibility of therapy which partly proceeds by exploring possibilities for personal change through personal construct adjustment.
Personal constructs are organised in hierarchical systems. People use their construct systems to understand, predict and control the external world. It is partly by uncovering and loosening these systems, and the constructs that comprise them, that the PCT therapist achieves psychotherapeutic change.
Radical Constructivism has been much promoted by the American brief-therapy expert, Dr Paul Watzlawick. Radical Constructivism postdates Kelly but does nothing to contradict him.
In a refinement of great simplicity and elegance Watzlawick suggests it is helpful to categorise two different realities. First, the physical properties of things - he calls these first-order reality. Then second-order reality is the attributed meanings, significance, or value that people give things - their constructs. Watzalwick rightly says that a common error is to throw the two realities into one pot.
Adding Watzalwick to Kelly we can say that we construct our individual, social, scientific and ideological second order realities. Once constructed, our second-order realities determine our idea of the world and, hence, what we do in it. Once the world is seen in such a given way then this way of seeing actually creates that world [see Advaita in Psychotherapy].
Out of imaginary second order reality we create constructs about the world so as to be able to act. Our thoughts, feelings, decisions and actions arise out of these constructs. Usually we are not aware of our constructs as such and sometimes we behave as if they existed independently of us - especially those our culture embraces. Our constructs create a personal world specific to us which persists unless modified by therapy or by some other means.
Just as in PCT, part of the therapy task is to discover the components of the client's second-order reality that are behind any trouble. Then the strategy is to replace an existing painful second-order reality [the so-called problem with its origin somewhere in the past] with a different, more tolerable second-order reality [the so-called solution to the so-called problem] which produces more desirable results. The results are what counts because such solutions are no more than alternative reality constructions which are no more real, correct, or true than any other. Explanations, hypotheses and theories [second-order realities] only have significance if they create bridges to practical results that are wanted.
However, I believe we can go beyond the very useful exchanging of one second order reality for another. More about that will be found on the page on Advaita in Psychotherapy which also underpins my psychotherapy practice.
If you would like to contact Simon Crosby about Constructivist Psychology please fill in the form below.
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21 November 2003
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