Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Towards a Radical Redefinition of Psychology

Miller Mair, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, devoted his life to developing a psychology that provided a radical alternative to the behavioural, and latterly cognitive-behavioural, approaches that have dominated the field. He presented this work in a wide range of publications and conference papers, and prior to his untimely death in 2011 he had selected a number of these for a volume of his collected works. This book is based upon Miller’s selection, and includes several previously unpublished papers as well as others that are now out of print. Miller was considerably influenced by George Kelly’s personal construct psychology, as is apparent in most of his writings. However, his papers on psychology and psychotherapy also draw upon an extraordinarily wide range of other fields of knowledge, including imagery, metaphor, storytelling and narrative, rhetoric, discourse and conversation, poetry, and spirituality. These concerns are reflected in the contributions selected for this volume, which also demonstrate the variation in his style of writing from the more conventionally academic to the personal and poetic as he developed a ‘poetics of experience’ and a stance of ‘conversational inquiry’. Miller’s final publication was entitled ‘Enchanting psychology’, and it is hoped that this volume will provide an antidote to the disenchantment that many readers may feel with mechanistic and reductionist approaches in psychology and its clinical appli- cations, and more generally in health service rhetoric and policies. As these writings vividly demonstrate, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist can, and should, also be a poet, artist, and storyteller. The volume will be of value to readers previously unfamiliar with Miller’s ideas, but also to those who know his work, who will find here the first published selection of his papers.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 David Winter is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Programme Director of the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. His publications include Personal Construct Psychology in Clinical Practice (Routledge, 1992).

Nick Reed is Director of the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology, part of the Department of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. World Library of Mental Health Series

The World Library of Mental Health celebrates the important contributions to mental health made by leading experts in their individual fields. Each author has compiled a career-long collection of what they consider to be their finest pieces: extracts from books, journals, articles, major theoretical and practical contributions, and salient research findings. For the first time ever the work of each contributor is presented in a single volume so readers can follow the themes and progress of their work and identify the contributions made to, and the development of, the fields themselves. Each book in the series features a specially written introduction by the contributor giving an overview of his career, contextualizing his selection within the development of the field, and showing how his own thinking developed over time.

Rationality and Pluralism – The selected works of Windy Dryden By Windy Dryden

The Price of Love – The selected works of Colin Murray Parkes By Colin Murray Parkes

Attachments: Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis - The selected works of Jeremy Holmes By Jeremy Holmes

Passions, Persons, Psychotherapy, Politics – The selected works of Andrew Samuels By Andrew Samuels Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016

Towards a Radical Redefinition of Psychology – The selected works of Miller Mair Edited by David Winter and Nick Reed Towards a Radical Redefinition of Psychology The selected works of Miller Mair

Edited by David Winter and Nick Reed Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 First published 2015 by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 David Winter and Nick Reed The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-415-71255-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-74653-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 for Ingrid Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 I am not speaking I am not speaking from my beliefs things acquired and scrutinized and accepted as true but from my being Not to claim rights over others but to give forth whatever sweetness or pollen or seeds are mine to give 1.4.78.

(Originally published in Mair, M. (1989) Between Psychology and Psychotherapy: a poetics of experience, London: Routledge, pp. 117–18, and reprinted by permission of Routledge.) Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CONTENTS

Preface xi Miller Mair: publication list xv

PART I Knowing and telling 1 1 The long quest to know 3 A new reformation 3 A world in the making 6 Manners of knowing 8 2 Telling psychological tales 10 Psychology and storytelling 10 Speaking for myself 10 Some issues in relation to language and telling 11 Telling and being told 11 Controlling conventions in psychological telling 12 Some aspects of Kelly’s telling 15 Reconsidering what Kelly was after 16 3 The personal venture 20 Kinds of knowing 21 Knowing people 22

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Being known 22 Knowing personally 23 Being personal 24 Personal inquiry 25 The cost of being personal 25 A personal psychology 26 Knowing and meeting 27 viii Contents

PART II Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry 29 4 Psychology as a discipline of discourse 31 What is ‘discourse’? 31 Mikhail Bakhtin on discourse and dialogue 32 My activities as a psychologist and psychotherapist 34 An agenda for psychology as a ‘discipline of discourse’ 35 Making a way in the world 38 5 Conversational research and clinical practice 40 Some reflections on what I am about 40 Some reflections on clinical practice 41 Reconsidering our relationship with the world 43 Different assumptions for psychology 44 Speaking to know 45 Conversational practices 47 Aspects of conversational inquiry 49 Concluding comments 50 6 Psychologists are human too 51 The psychologist’s dilemma 52 Subjects as scientists 54 A methodological theory without adequate methods 55 Bringing the experimenter in from the cold 57 The cycle of enquiry 58 A conversational model for psychological enquiry 60 Why? 61 Some features of a conversational science 66 Psychologists as people 69

PART III Metaphors 71 7 Metaphors for living 73 An introduction to metaphor 74 The importance of metaphor 75 Some uses of metaphor 77 Being used by metaphor 79 Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 But what is metaphor? 80 Some metaphors of metaphor 83 Metaphors and constructs 84 Aspects of personal construct psychology 86 A psychology of living 96 8 The community of self 102 ‘What is man that we should be mindful of him?’ 102 Psychology and the reduction of man 102 Alternatives 104 Self as community 105 Examples of personal ‘communities’ 106 Contents ix

Some comments on ‘community’ 110 ‘Community’ in context 111 Personal Construct Theory and ‘community’ 113 Persons and constructs 113 Thinking and action 114 Organization and control 114 One and many 115 Self and other 116 Making-up and scaling-down ourselves 118

PART IV Psychotherapy and story telling 121 9 Stories we live and stories we tell 123 Telling our stories 123 Telling ‘clinical’ stories 123 Stories I live and stories I tell 125 Crisis and care 125 A fundamental reappraisal 126 A focus on telling 127 Creative telling 127 One voice . . . amongst many 128 10 Psychotherapy, conversation and story telling 131 Introducing myself and some of my concerns 131 Psychotherapy as conversation 132 Stories and story telling 134 Helping people to tell their stories 136 Aspects of story telling in psychotherapy 140 Continuing the conversation 146

PART V Understanding 147 11 A long term quest for understanding 149 Introduction 149 What am I up to and involved in? 150

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 What are some of my changing understandings of PCP? 152 What themes are involved here? 160 12 Searching to understand – on being a psychologist in a changing world 162 Introduction 162 A little personal history 164 A practical illustration 165 Searching and understanding 168 Some features of ‘searching to understand’ 171 So what is this mode of inquiry about? 175 On being a psychologist in a changing world 176 x Contents

13 Enchanting psychology: the poetry of personal inquiry 177 Introduction 177 A little personal, psychological history 178 A practical illustration 180 An emerging psychological perspective 184 Enchanting and disenchanting 188 Personal inquiry and public psychology 190

References 193 Index 197 Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 PREFACE

John Mitchell Miller Mair was born on 14 May 1937 in Aberdeenshire in Scotland, the younger of two boys. He describes himself as a ‘country boy’, brought up in a family much influenced by the Church of Scotland, in which he considered that there were expectations that he would follow a family tradition of joining the ministry. How- ever, as a teenager he came to realize that he did not believe in the religious dogmas concerned, and he eventually completed an MA in Psychology at the University of Aberdeen (in the process being awarded the Henry Prize in psychology), before training in clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and completing a PhD at the University of London. He soon found, though, that he was also unable to believe in the dominant psychological dogma of the time, namely learning theory, and in the behavioural methods derived from it that were championed at the Institute of Psychiatry. Like several similarly disenchanted psychologists of his generation, he then had the liberating experience of discovering personal construct theory, devised by the Ameri- can psychologist George Kelly (1955), another ‘country boy’ from a Presbyterian background. He described his excitement (‘a mixture of illumination, delight and a sense of expansive beauty’ (Mair 1995a: 4)) at reading the two weighty volumes in which Kelly set out his vision of a new psychology, and considered that he was ‘involved in a dance with Kelly’ (ibid.: 3) ever since. This dance took him away from the more formal aspects of personal construct theory and its principal assessment technique, the repertory grid (which he used in his earliest research in this area, co-authoring the first textbook on this technique (Bannister and Mair 1968)), to the concerns expressed in Kelly’s essays (Maher 1969), as much in their ‘way of telling’ as in their content. It was a dance that attempted to elucidate the ‘kind of psychology George Kelly was, perhaps, reaching toward’ (Mair

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 1990: 121), which he saw as ‘a moral science of action’ (Mair 1985: 8). Miller’s ‘co-conspirators’ in his initial exploration of personal construct psychology and promotion of its ideas were a group of psychologists that came to be known as the ‘Kelly club’, the most prominent members of which were Don Bannister, Fay Fransella, and Phillida Salmon. Don Bannister’s forthright style was effectively complemented by Miller’s gentler approach, which led Don to refer to him as the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel of Psychology’. Miller’s view of himself was that he was more of a ‘Robin Hood of ordinary experiencing, waylaying the self-satisfaction of the obvious to uncover its precious nature’ (Mair 1986: 3). He organized the first international symposium on personal construct psychology in 1968, was one of the main speakers at what was eventually regarded as the first International Congress on Personal Construct Psychol- ogy in Nebraska in 1975, co-organized the second such congress with Bannister and Fransella in Oxford in 1977, and made major contributions to several subsequent xii Preface

personal construct congresses and conferences. Although his public involvement in personal construct psychology lessened over the years, it continued to be a major influence on his thinking and work, and he returned to the more public personal construct psychology fold in the penultimate year of his life with keynote addresses at the 10th Conference of the European Personal Construct Association in Belgrade and the 14th Conference of the Constructivist Psychology Network at Niagara Falls, where he was presented with a lifetime achievement award. Another, not unrelated, major concern of Miller’s was to promote the involvement and training of psychologists in psychotherapy, rather than just the behavioural approaches that dominated the limited therapeutic activities of clinical psychologists at the time that he trained. To this end, he founded the Psychology and Psychotherapy Association in 1973. Its journal, New Forum, was subsequently renamed Changes, and eventually became the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. Miller also served as Chair of the Psychotherapy Section of the British Psychological Society in 1999, and was a member of the Society’s Psychotherapy Implementation Group, the work of which culminated in a Register of Psychologists Specialising in Psychotherapy. His working life from 1963 to 1975 consisted of posts as a Lecturer (subsequently Senior Lecturer) and Clinical Psychologist in the Academic Department of Psychiatry of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School. He then moved back to Scotland to become Director of the Department of Psychological Services and Research at the Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries, where he stayed for 22 years. The Department had a tradition for a personal, rather than technique-focused, approach, and this was furthered in a Course of Post Qualification Study and Practice in Therapeutic Psychology that was provided there between 1980 and 1994. One of the ways in which Miller was an unusual director of a department was that he managed to carve out about half of his time to spend conducting therapy and supervision. It is clear that he became more and more concerned about the direction in which the National Health Service was heading, for example with its rhetoric of marketed care, and that he found the managerial and administrative demands of his job increasingly taxing. After retiring from this post, he practised independently as a Chartered Clinical Psychologist, and for ten years was a Resident Fellow at Kinharvie Institute in Glasgow, where his commitments included setting up an MSc programme in Counselling and Supervision, validated by Glasgow Caledonian University. In 2001, he was awarded a Visiting Professorship at City Uni- versity, London. Over the years, Miller’s scholarship became increasingly wide ranging as he explored such areas as imagery, metaphor, story and narrative, rhetoric, discourse and conversation, poetry, and spirituality in relation to psychology and psychotherapy. In doing so, he elaborated a ‘poetics of experience’ and a stance of ‘conversational inquiry’.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Like Kelly, his ‘ways of telling’ also diversified, and his writings as Miller Mair, rather than the J.M.M. Mair of his earlier work, became more poetic and personal. A central thread throughout his work remained the development of a new psychology and of the ‘new Reformation’ (Mair 1985: 4) that he glimpsed in his first reading of Kelly’s writings. As his particular focus shifted, he variously termed this new psychology a personal psychology (Mair 1979, 1980); a psychology of the edge (Mair 1985); a psychology of personal knowing (Mair 1985); a conversational psychology (Mair 1986); a radically questioning and subversive psychology (Mair, 1986); a practical psychology (Mair 1990); a stortyelling discipline (Mair 1990); a discipline of discourse (Mair 2000); a psychology of understanding (Mair 1995b); and an enchanting psychology (Mair 2012). These various concerns are reflected in the works selected for this book, which we hope, in elucidating Miller’s view of a radical redefinition of psychology, will help to recapture psychology’s capacity to enchant. Preface xiii

Miller died suddenly of a heart attack on 9 June 2011. Towards the end of his life, he had been putting together a collection of his papers with a view to their being published as his selected works. He described this process thus:

I then began to look out some of my old papers. In the late afternoon I uncovered about 40 or so. There are more to be thought about and some need a lot of work on them. I am thinking of getting a secretary to type them up. It would, though, mean that I would be able to leave a collection of some of my past life. Ingrid1 is quite right in saying that I should make this as simple as possible or it will never be done. My tendency is to want to lay it all out beautifully and make a work of art of it, with linking commentary and such like. I think that would make it a lot better. I might gather the papers in groups by themes2 rather that in chronological order – though both have their attractions. I should try to get this done by the time we go to Dublin in 20123 and give a copy to Bernadette4 then. Maybe, if it is done, it will encourage me to get on with the Book too – and even try to get my 1989 book reprinted.

Space constraints prevent the inclusion of all of the papers that Miller selected in this volume, but, as well as reprinting some of his classic expositions of particular themes, we were concerned to make available papers that are previously unpublished or no longer in print (these constituting about half of the chapters in the volume). We are also making all except one of the previously unpublished papers that are not included here available on the website of the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology (www. centrepcp.co.uk). The exception is ‘George Kelly’s psychology of understanding: questioning our understanding, understanding our questioning’ (Mair 1995b), which will be published in a separate volume (Winter and Reed 2015). We shall also provide on the website a list of some of the very many conference presentations and invited talks that Miller gave. This list will be incomplete, as details of pre-1996 presentations were lost when he transferred information between computers, and we would welcome suggested additions to the list from colleagues who know of missing papers. In the complete list of his publications below, all of the papers that he selected for the collected works are marked with an asterisk, and conference papers that he selected are listed at the end of the publication list. The ‘Book’ that Miller had been working on, to which he refers above, was provision- ally entitled ‘Reflections on the Poetry of Psychological Inquiry’, and the manuscript of some 200,000 words is now being prepared for publication by Simon King-Spooner. Miller’s 1989 book, Between Psychology and Psychotherapy: A Poetics of Experience has now been republished by Routledge; and an archive drawn from his extensive library Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 of books, papers, and other material is to be opened at the University of Hertfordshire under the auspices of the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology. None of these developments, including the present volume, would have been possible without the dedication and help of Ingrid Mair, whom Miller married in 1997, and the permission of his children from his first marriage, Andrew, Imogen, and Frances. We are very grateful to them, and to Harry Procter for suggesting the book title. We are also grateful to the following for permission to republish papers (precise acknowledgements are provided at the end of the relevant chapters): Ingrid Mair (Chapters 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, and 11); Elsevier (Chapter 3); Taylor and Francis (Chapters 2, 4, and 13); University of Nebraska Press (Chapters 1 and 7); and Dusan Stojnov (Chapter 12). We also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Mrs Nicola Reed, who helped us with proof reading the manuscript. xiv Preface

Notes 1 Ingrid Mair. 2 In this collection, we have grouped papers by themes, although these are not necessarily the themes that Miller would have chosen. 3 Miller had been invited to be keynote speaker at the 11th Conference of the European Personal Construct Association in Dublin. 4 Dr Bernadette O’Sullivan. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 MILLER MAIR Publication list

Meyer, V. and Mair, J.M.M. (1963) ‘A new technique to control stammering: a preliminary report’, Behaviour Research & Therapy 1: 251–4. Mair, J.M.M. (1964) ‘The derivation, reliability and validity of grid measures: some problems and suggestions’, Bulletin of British Psychological Society 17: 55. Mair, J.M.M. (1964) ‘The concepts of reliability and validity in relation to construct theory and grid technique’, in N. Warren (ed.) Brunel Construct Theory Seminar Report, Uxbridge, UK: Brunel University. Mair, J.M.M. (1966) ‘Prediction of grid scores’, British Journal of Psychology 57: 187–92. Mair, J.M.M. (1967) ‘Some problems in repertory grid measurement: 1. The use of bipolar constructs’, British Journal of Psychology 58: 261–70. Mair, J.M.M. (1967) ‘Some problems in repertory grid measurement: 2. The use of whole figure constructs’, British Journal of Psychology, 58: 271–82. Mair, J.M.M. and Boyd, P.R. (1967) ‘A comparison of two grid forms’, British Journal of Social & Clinical Psychology 6: 220–7. Mair, J.M.M. and Crisp, A.H. (1968) ‘Estimating psychological organisation, meaning and change in relation to clinical practice’, British Journal of Medical Psychology 41: 15– 29. Bannister, D. and Mair, J.M.M. (1968) The Evaluation of Personal Constructs, London: Aca- demic Press. Mair, J.M.M. (1969) ‘Personal constructs and personal growth’, De Psycholoog IV: 360–77. Mair, J.M.M. (1970) ‘Psychological problems and cigarette smoking’, Journal of Psychosomatic Research 14: 277–83. Mair, J.M.M. (1970) ‘The person in psychology and psychotherapy: an introduction’, British Journal of Medical Psychology 43: 197–205. Mair, J.M.M. (1970) ‘Experiments with individuals’, British Journal of Medical Psychology 43: 245–56. *Mair, J.M.M. (1970) ‘Psychologists are human too’, in D. Bannister (ed.) Perspectives in Per- sonal Construct Theory, London: Academic Press. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Mair, J.M.M. (1977) ‘Psychology and psychotherapy: some common concerns’, British Journal of Medical Psychology 50: 21–5. *Mair, J.M.M. (1977) ‘The community of self’, in D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Per- sonal Construct Theory, London: Academic Press. *Mair, M. (1977) ‘Metaphors for living’, in A.W. Landfield (ed.) Nebraska Symposium on Moti- vation 1976: Personal Construct Psychology, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. *Mair, M. (1979) ‘The personal venture’, in P. Stringer and D. Bannister (eds) Constructs of Sociality and Individuality, London: Academic Press. *Mair, M. (1980) ‘Feeling and knowing’, in P. Salmon (ed.) Coming to Know, London: Rout- ledge & Kegan Paul. *Mair, M. (1983) ‘Caring for who you are’, News and Views: The Official Bulletin of the Dum- fries and Galloway Health Board December 1982/January 1983. *Mair, M. (1983) ‘Becoming who you are’, News and Views: The Official Bulletin of the Dum- fries and Galloway Health Board April 1983. xvi Miller Mair: publication list

*Mair, M. (1985) ‘The long quest to know’, in F. Epting and A.W. Landfield (eds) Anticipating Personal Construct Psychology, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Mair, M. (1986) Donald Bannister: Obituary. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 39: 305. Mair, M. (1987) ‘Pretending to care’, in E. Karas (ed.) Current Issues in Clinical Psychology, London: Plenum. Mair, M., Cooke, M., Dunne, J. and Furnell, J. (1987) ‘Developing “adequate” clinical psychology services: a Scottish inquiry’, Clinical Psychology Forum 10: 12–15. Mair, M. (1988) ‘Psychology as story telling’, International Journal of Personal Construct Psy- chology 1, 125–37. *Mair, M. (1988) ‘A psychology for a changing world’, British Psychological Society Psycho- therapy Section Newsletter 4: 6–15. *Mair, M. (1988) ‘Recent rhetoric in the NHS: reflections on the language of marketed care’, British Psychological Society Psychotherapy Section Newsletter 5. Mair, M. (1989) Between Psychology and Psychotherapy: a poetics of experience, London: Routledge. Mair, M. (1989) ‘Psychology as a discipline of discourse’, British Psychological Society Psycho- therapy Section Newsletter 7. Mair, M. (1989) ‘Kelly, Bannister and a story telling psychology’, International Journal of Per- sonal Construct Psychology 2: 1–14. *Mair, M. (1990) ‘Telling psychological tales’, International Journal of Personal Construct Psy- chology 3: 121–35. Mair, M. (1990) ‘Speaking the truth’, British Psychological Society Psychotherapy Section News- letter 9. Mair, M. (1991) ‘Psychology and Psychotherapy Association: a proposal concerning future developments’, Changes 9: 146–50. Mair, M. (1992) ‘Competencies for counselling psychology: some preliminary considerations’, Counselling Psychology Review 7: 10–18. Mair, M. (1998) ‘Conversational inquiry: questioning our understanding’, Report on Method- ologies for the Study of Consciousness, Kalamazoo, Michigan: Fetzer Institute. Mair, M. (1998) ‘Therapeutic psychology and personal inquiry: a need for poet practitioners’, British Psychological Society Annual Conference Proceedings 6: 122. *Mair, M. (1998) ‘Inquiry in conversation: speaking our minds’, British Psychological Society Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section Newsletter 2: 5–7. Mair, M. (1998) ‘George Kelly’s psychology of understanding: questioning our understanding, understanding our questioning’ (Italian translation), in G. Chiari and M.L. Nuzzo (eds) Con Gli Occhi dell’Altro, Padua: Unipress. *Mair, M. (1999) ‘Inquiry in conversation: questions, quests, search and research’, British Psy- chological Society Psychotherapy Section Newsletter 25: 2–15. Mair, M. (1999) ‘Writing ourselves psychologically: an invitation to poet practitioners’, British Psychological Society Psychotherapy Section Newsletter 26: 3. Mair, M. (2000) ‘Psychology as a discipline of discourse’, European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling & Health 3: 335–47. Mair, M. (2001) The Register of Psychologists Specialising in Psychotherapy: principles and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 procedures, Leicester: British Psychological Society. Mair, M. (2003) ‘Some thoughts on how to survive without psychotherapy by D. Smail’, Clinical Psychology 24: 20–2. Mair, M. (2003) ‘A psychology of questions’, in F. Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology, Chichester: Wiley. Mair, M. (2007) ‘Widening the boundaries of our awareness: developing a different culture of inquiry’, Counselling in Scotland, Winter/Spring. *Mair, M. (2008) ‘Seeing in the dark or writing as lighting’, in C. Shillito-Clarke and M. Thol- strup (eds) Occasional Papers in Supervision, Leicester: British Psychological Society. *Mair, M. (2011) ‘Searching to understand: on being a psychologist in a changing world’, in D. Stojnov, V. Džinovic´, J. Pavlovic´ and M. Frances (eds) Personal Construct Psychology in an Accelerating World, Belgrade: Serbian Constructivist Association/EPCA Publications. *Mair, M. (2012) ‘Enchanting psychology: the poetry of personal inquiry’, Journal of Construc- tivist Psychology 25: 184–209. Miller Mair: publication list xvii

Conference papers selected by Miller Mair for Selected Works Mair, M. ‘Stories we live and stories we tell’. Mair, M. ‘Psychotherapy, conversation and story telling’. Mair, M. (1986) ‘Conversational research and clinical practice’, paper presented at British Psy- chological Society Division of Clinical Psychology Research Interest Group conference on qualitative research, Cambridge. Mair, M. (1988) ‘Recent rhetoric in the NHS: reflections on the language of marketed care’, paper presented at conference of British Psychological Society Psychotherapy Section on psychotherapy, psychological care, and the crisis in the NHS. Mair, M. (1990) ‘Speaking the truth’, paper presented at British Psychological Society Psycho- therapy Section meeting on developing a language for psychological research, London. Mair, M. (1995) ‘A long term quest for understanding’, paper presented at XIth International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology, Barcelona. Mair, M. (1995) ‘George Kelly’s psychology of understanding: questioning our understanding, understanding our questioning’, paper presented at 2nd Italian Congress on Personal Con- struct Psychology, San Benedetto del Tronto. David Winter and Nick Reed February, 2014 Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 This page intentionally left bank Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 PART I

KNOWING AND TELLING Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 This page intentionally left bank Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CHAPTER 1

THE LONG QUEST TO KNOW1

I have wrestled with George Kelly’s ideas off and on for over twenty years and am still finding much in his writing that touches and affects me in ways that I still don’t understand. For me the main inspiration in his writing has been that he seems to be pointing us toward what I would call a psychology of personal knowing, which I am sure will be something different from the landscape of psychology we now inhabit. Kelly’s contributions were almost entirely conceptual, and his limitations are also conceptual. Sometimes he couldn’t quite reach far enough and sometimes could only speak from within certain issues that he couldn’t yet get out, look at, and talk about. For me, Kelly’s work is not an end in itself nor a place to stop, but part of a longer tradition. In this tradition Kelly is offering a meeting place, for the moment, where he is suggesting the getting together of issues in science, the arts, religion, and a number of other disciplines. It is his claim of being concerned with man’s continuing quest to know that strikes me with such particular force. My unhappiness with much that has resulted from Kelly’s work is that we’ve used some of his ideas and some of his methods largely within the framework of our conventional psychological assumptions and values, and so we have produced just another segment of familiar experimentation and are ending up by posing no radical challenge at all – no challenge to the roots of the kind of psychology that was there before Kelly came along. I believe this to be a great loss because his writing carries within it fundamental challenges to the roots of much of present psychology. I want here to attend at the level of his psychology rather than to his theory. I will try to draw your attention to several aspects of personal knowing that Kelly was concerned with in practice and which need to be drawn more into the light. Each of these calls for further conceptualization rather than further data. The issue, then, is about

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 conceptualization, not primarily about data.

A new reformation I believe we are dealing here with the beginnings of a new psychology and also a new Reformation. Kelly’s new psychology, when it appeared, had roots reaching back to the earliest myths of man’s struggle to know and understand, to his much-used example of the Garden of Eden and the choice made there by man to live by understanding and the sweat of his brow rather than by having his reinforcements handed out daily. His work, it seems to me, is clearly part of the tradition of Protestant, Christian, biblical struggles to know – to know who and what and where we are in the world and how we are to understand ourselves as children of the universe. A strong case can be made for 4 Knowing and telling

saying that he contributed to what I’m calling a second Reformation. Instead of Mar- tin Luther’s claim that each man should be his own priest, Kelly (coming well within the scientific tradition) sought to give science back to us, as Luther aimed to give our forefathers back their right of direct access to the God they sought and worshipped. Kelly’s “each man as if his own scientist” is directly equivalent in its cultural intentions to this earlier claim that each should be “as if his own priest.” That is to say, it is the offer and the claim of what Kelly called epistemological responsibility, becoming responsible for what and how we seek to know. So much in his approach is held clearly within the structure of the Protestant tradition – personal knowing, lived-knowing rather than knowing-in-the-head. He uses terms like commitment, involvement, sin, repentance, choice, threat, guilt, risk, and faith to describe the profound venture of man in reaching to know, to reach into the unknown, toward the truth that lies wholly beyond our changing approximations, seen through a glass darkly, a long way from knowing as we may yet be known. What Kelly is proposing, it seems to me, is a venturesome humanism that is deeply attentive to the psychological learnings to be gained from this enduring quest. This is a quest and a tradition that most psychologists ignore, yet it was quite clearly of central importance in Kelly’s writing.

Right and wrong There seem to be a number of basic issues in the psychology Kelly was beginning to conjure up. Arguably, the most basic of these is his concern with morality, with right and wrong, good and evil. It is remarkable how little has been said about this aspect of his work. Kelly asked about right and wrong, for whom and when and toward what ends and with what kind of regard for others and how it might yet be. Almost all of Kelly’s psychology may have to do with his own struggle to be free of the fierce morality of his youth and of the time and place of his upbringing. He seems to be reaching for a publicly justified ground for how it might yet be for him, for other ways to see things, making a stab toward a morality of doubt, of search, of courage, of quest, of questioning. Kelly in his writings, and especially in his essays, reached backward to Greece and Adam, Christ and Mozart to weave this alternative theme. Guilt for Kelly, as for many in the Christian tradition, is a central companion of anxiety, threat, and fear, because it has to do with being and not being oneself – being what I am expected to be or being someone strange, other or just plain wrong. His whole concern with reconstruing, with repentance (which was another way he referred to it), with learning from one’s sins as opposed to not sinning, is perhaps part of his own struggle to find some kind of freedom, some way out of earlier traps that he found himself held within. And they must have been quite fierce traps for him to have exerted

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 such effort to create the public world of his theory through which he, but more likely others, would find a freedom that many within that often rigid Protestant tradition could not find. Kelly, I think, had two demons at least, not just one. Both science and religion sat brooding on his back, and he did the wily thing and went close to both of them and put the tail of one into the other’s mouth so that they might tantalize and struggle with each other from here on in, perhaps to allow something new to be created between them for the sake of man.

Some quotes To lend some strength to what I am claiming on Kelly’s behalf, I will quote some of his own words on these matters. The long quest to know 5

In “The psychology of the unknown” (1977) he defines what he considers to be “the basic psychological problem of man.” This for him is a creative act of knowing, “to transcend the obvious.” He goes on to define also what he considers to be “the primary problem for the psychologist,” and this is again to do with knowing. This problem and task is to reach ever further in coming to understand “how man, from his position of relative ignorance, can hope to reach out for knowledge that no one has yet attained.” In “Sin and psychotherapy” Kelly (1969a) indicates something of the value he ascribes to enduring myths and stories. “When a story has been told and retold through the centuries and it challenges, as this story does [the Garden of Eden story] generation after generation of scholars, then only the scientist who is willfully blind to human nature can ignore what is currently going on. Certainly the psychologist, least of all scientists, can afford to ignore it altogether.” In talking of good and evil, he goes on here to acknowledge that “we must concede, of course, that some men have lost interest in the quest. This is quite understandable when we consider the fact that most of the systems for dealing with good and evil are designed to circumvent the necessity of coming to grips with the problem.” He goes on to assert his belief in the openness of the issues involved in this ancient puzzle. “The important thing to remember is,” he says, “despite all the blatant claims that are made on every hand, no one has yet constructed the final answer to the question of what is good and what is evil and that the moment man gives up the enterprise he is lost.” In this same essay he goes further to make this crucial claim when talking of the psychologist who attempts to assist his fellow man. He says that he should “keep this truth central to his system of practice . . . The task is to assist the individual man in what is singularly the most important undertaking in his life, the fullest possible understanding of the nature of good and evil” (my italics). “This inquiry,” he claims, “is the chosen quest of all mankind and that includes both you and your client.” Then, for such a propositional psychologist, he becomes quite unusually preemptive as he insists, “Don’t abandon it (this quest) under any conditions – whether guilt, fear or laziness. Don’t abandon it for any set of prefabricated conclusions. Above all don’t let your client abandon it!” In “Psychotherapy and the nature of man” Kelly (1969b) speaks again about how “man made a fateful decision. He chose to live his life by understanding rather than obedience.” And again he indicates the continuing openness of the issues in pointing out that “just as in the case of science, what we shall come to realize as sinful a thousand years from now may bear no more resemblance to the evils that preachers talk about today than does the morality of a thousand years ago – or even a hundred years ago – resemble 1963’s emerging sense of decency, especially as it applies to such matters as the equality of racial opportunity.”

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 He goes further here to suggest that “the closer one gets to persons, the closer one gets to the nature of man” and insists that “to the extent that psychology fails to touch the intimate life of man it makes the same mistake that was made in Eden.” Finally for the moment, in “Confusion and the clock” (1978) he states clearly, “Of course, I believe in truth, believe in it very deeply, but not literally like some people who hold up a book and say ‘This is it, the only infallible rule of faith and practice.’” He goes on to ask, “Why don’t they say instead ‘This is the story of men’s quest of God. As you see, they haven’t got very far. But it’s a better guide to our further quests than the pronouncements of any one man, no matter how devout he may be.’” “Must we always pretend that truth is only what is?” he asks. In seeking something of his own answer he suggests, “From the moment that we assume that truth is a sta- tionary achievement, rather than a stage in a lively quest, it is only a matter of time until things start spinning round and round. Truth is neither reality nor phantasy. It 6 Knowing and telling

needs to be understood instead as a continually emerging relationship between reality and ingenuity, and thus is never something that can be skewered by a phrase, a moment or a place.” “But can man ever trust himself aloft to such aerodynamics? Will he ever be able to get his mind off the ground and fly?” This question is left hanging in the air between us as he moves further to link justice and truth. “We tend,” he says, “to regard it [justice] like truth, something all packaged rather than something continually in the process of definition.” This continuous process of construction and reconstruction in man’s struggles to know is a pervasive theme informing George Kelly’s passion to find another way.

A moral science of action Surely in all of this Kelly was reaching for something like a moral science of action, a moral science of human questioning, questing. Yet little is said of this in most of what we have so far published in work related to personal construct psychology. And most of what might be involved has simply not yet been conceived, because Kelly himself didn’t turn to spell out explicitly some of the parameters of such a moral science of action. He turned toward spelling out something of a theory of action and away from the very different issues of how to compose the structure of a science, its rules, values, and such, within which a theory might have its home. What we mainly have at present is a theory and set of methods that are still mostly understood and utilized in relation to the values and procedures of existing notions of science and psychology. However, any theory and any notion of a science must refer to some particular kind of world that it is assumed the theory and the science are somehow particularly structured to explore. What kind of psychological world did Kelly assume and seek especially to explore? It is to this wider context that I now turn.

A world in the making In rereading Kelly’s essays in particular, I have tried to do so with the eyes of my mind half closed, as it were, so that I might sense something of the main features of the kind of world he was inhabiting in the psychology he was struggling to create. As I looked and listened in this way, many of the details and particulars of his arguments fell away, and I began to conjure up something of that possible world whose reality he sought especially to realize. Any theory offers a perspective on some aspect of a world. Any psychology, presumably, offers a world within worlds. Thus within a psychology (if such a unified notion makes any useful sense) there may be many competing theories. The theories,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 presumably, are to be evaluated and adjudged (in the first instance, at least) within the valuings and rules of reality enshrined in the psychological world in question. What kind of psychological world is offered for view most especially in and through personal construct psychology? It is a world of edges, exceptions, extremities, incidents, moments, intimacy, opportunity in crisis, tragedy, uncertainty, transformation, lack of solidity, risk, demand, personal involvement, radical involvement of who we are and are to become. It is a world of epic nudity, epic pretending, wherein we become who we are and are not, through the fig leaves of who we risk acting as. It is a world of profound moral demand, or at least moral opportunity, in which good and evil between man and man, man and world are major protagonists (though now, in contrast to times past, we are their soldiers and statesmen, their judges and juries). It is a world of epic proportions in which man is cast in the roles of hero and sufferer, actor and producer, creature and The long quest to know 7

creator. Man is offered the invitation of responsibility, not as a burden of duty, but as the challenge of adulthood to the young seeking to undertake great deeds. It is a world of entering and understanding, not of looking at and explaining, a world always incomplete and not only at risk but put at risk by the intention of new action, new questioning. It is a world of past as well as a world where new possibilities of the past can only be dared in as yet undiscovered futures. Everything is ahead, including everything that is behind. We are allowed the dangerous possibility of now in which everything may yet be otherwise. It is not a world of eternal verities, nor a world that rolls along imperturbably at its own unchanging rate. It is a world in which everything is explored in faith (faiths of different kinds which often turn into hostilities) and is, from our point of view, entirely subject to revision. It is a world that is accelerating and in which our achievements of yesterday themselves cast us increasingly into the darkness of unknowing, into accelerating ignorance as well as accelerated demands to act without the security of knowing for sure. It is not a world where we get it right the first time and that’s how it will stay. Again and again, if we return and have to return, what we will make of things will be re-formed in what we now are and what we now know, through the ventures we have dared and the continuing blindness of what we did not risk or failed to imagine. It is a world of moral challenge, of choice, of guilt and tragic failure, of conduct rather than factuality. It is world that is profoundly mysterious, and we are the doors and windows, arms and legs of that mystery. There are and were and always will be an infinity of ways not taken and paths not trod, of worlds not realised. The world is that kind of world. We are in the midst of creation. It is in being who we are and are to be. It is a touch-and-go business, not clear and safe and according to plan. It is a world of edges, of opportunities, of hiddenness in what becomes obvious. As versions of it are formed, it becomes another world, hardened into reality that endures, facts that lay claim to us, bonds that tie us, obviousness that looks quizzically and dismissively at our impertinences. In the world of edges, newness is at the edge of all familiar coverings, sparkling allures of beckoning truth on every new horizon to which our eyes open and our spirits dare and our frames of sustaining form enable us to know. This is not a world of ease and stability, not a place of cultivation and safety. We are at risk; we risk the world in everything we do. We destroy untold worlds in what we do and do not do; we have to choose. Exceptional moments are of the essence, since in them we are again in touch, on the scent of how it might be, what may yet become. The settled and cultivated gardens and institutions of everyday survival are both an avoidance of this world of risk and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 opportunity and also part of our way of asserting stillness in the midst of change.

A psychology of the edge Surely, then, any psychology of this kind of world will have to be a psychology of the edge, a psychology of new creations, a psychology of exceptions rather than of rules. We are clearly in the midst of personal risk and personal choice. In this kind of realm a psychology of personal knowing will require some notion of knowing which brings ontology and epistemology into intimate and necessary relationship with each other. In exploring and entering this kind of world, it is not going to be a psychology of conventional behaviour (which much of behavioural and positivist psychology is and has been), nor a psychology of conventions (which newer approaches, like ethogenics, could be considered as), which will guide and sustain our inquiries. Neither, I think, 8 Knowing and telling

will this new psychology stand instead of these other psychologies. It will be as well as rather than in place of. We inhabit many worlds within worlds and surely have to raise our sights and widen our horizons. We need to do more to specify the worlds we are creating psychologies to cope with and cope within. We live in many worlds and require many psychologies nestling around and within each other. We scarcely yet begin to conceive of them or discriminate among them or recognize the kinds of knowing they may differently require.

Manners of knowing Kelly’s style of writing in his essays is often rather different from that of his first volumes. Perhaps we can assume that he was more relaxed in these later works because he had already managed to give some form to many of the big issues that concerned him. It may also be that he was getting closer to saying things in the variety of ways he wanted. He was, for instance, engaged in writing a very different style of book when he died and had often said that he wished he had said differently some of what he had already written. He also, at times, said that he wished he had not published his repertory grid method along with everything else, since its appearance had obscured much in his theory that might have more general importance. His essays are widely different from each other too. Kelly employs different manners and means of formulating and expressing the matters in question. The essays touch on and show different ways of talking. They include different ways of saying, ways of touching issues, ways of conjuring them up, ways of posing one issue against another. He seems to be creating a variety of modes or manners through which aspects of the reality he tried to conceive could be caught and worked on. He was offering different ways of realizing significant events, presumably because the manner in which things are done has a fundamentally important bearing on what is being done. In psychology, and science generally, we still seem to rely heavily on our puritan heritage in supposing that there is a plain style that will take us most directly to the truth of things. Our reliance on the scientific method suggests that we still suppose it to be a royal road to the plain, unvarnished facts. But, of course, no facts are plain or unvarnished. Indeed, in human relationships, all facts are necessarily shaped by particular means, manners, modes, tone, overtones, and undertones. So there is no point in relying on one method if we are seeking to find ways of identifying, bodying forth, suggesting, conjuring up, reaching out to touch some of the kinds of reality Kelly seemed to be trying to conceive. We may need many ways of doing it. Kelly gives at least some beginnings, some examples of different ways. His essays are often laced with humour. He makes considerable use of parables, turning them around, approaching them from unusual angles,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 using them for purposes different from their conventional use, showing afresh that they may have something new to say even within the context of psychology and science, now. He seemed repeatedly concerned that we should look back and reconstrue and make more and other of what was and might have been. Not only are there stories from the Bible; one complete essay – “Epilogue: Don Juan” (1969c) – is centred on Mozart’s opera. Through Kelly’s probing of this old theme, he begins to spell out something of what might be meant in speaking of psychological truth. In another piece – “Confusion and the clock” – his concern with time is explored, back and forth, as he tries with cool passion to allow us to enter his world put in jeopardy by his own heart attack. Many who have read some of Kelly’s writing have commented on the attractive manner in which he wrote, though sometimes finding it difficult to grasp the substance of his arguments. What has not been recognized very clearly is that this variable manner may be The long quest to know 9

an essential aspect of what is being said. When someone is trying to conjure up a world to be explored, it is of little use to insist on boiling everything down to some supposed central theme.

To be always beginning So, I believe, we are still at a beginning even though we are part of a long, long quest in coming more fully to know what it might mean to know personally. This quest has been renewed over thousands of years in different ways, and we are again at a beginning. Every human discipline enshrines some aspect of man’s struggle to come to know and not to know. There is around us, and behind us, a panoply of possibilities for beginning to learn something more of the urgently demanding issues of human knowing. Much in Kelly’s writing indicates and hints at roads we have not taken, and Robert Frost’s poem (1973) called “The road not taken” says something of the choice that may be involved.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.

Whether the difference be for good or ill remains to be seen, but different roads are still there to be explored.

Note 1 Reprinted from Anticipating Personal Construct Psychology, edited by Franz Epting and Alvin W. Landfield, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1985 by the University of Nebraska Press. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CHAPTER 2

TELLING PSYCHOLOGICAL TALES1

Psychology is approached as a storytelling discipline. Various narrative devices used in many formal psychological tales are identified. George Kelly’s approach to telling is claimed to be very different, implying a different attitude to knowing and a different approach to knowledge. Following from this a proposal is made concerning the kind of psychology Kelly was, perhaps, reaching toward.

Psychology and storytelling In recent years I have been exploring a few of the implications of considering psychology as a storytelling discipline (Mair, 1989a). What is being suggested in this is that psychologists of all kinds tell stories of various sorts, according to different conventions. They differ as regards what constitutes suitable subject matter, worthwhile material to tell, appropriate ways of composing the narratives, and relevant attitudes in the listeners or readers. Mostly psychologists do not see themselves as storytellers – mere storytellers – supposing that their methods of inquiry raise them above that subjective level to a place of authority that is scientific rather than literary. Yet this claim to a special place of privilege is no longer quite so easy to sustain. Recent work in different disciplines seeks to view the productions of philosophers, psychologists, historians, and others as “literary” narratives, subject to all the accompanying strengths and weaknesses of such narratives, rather than anything more certainly distinctive. Here I want to focus on various aspects of telling – our acts of telling – and to approach from that perspective my continuing uncertainty as to what kind of psychology George Kelly was, perhaps, reaching toward. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Speaking for myself I don’t know about you but I have to admit that for all their cleverness and usefulness sometimes, very few of the psychologists’ stories I have read have touched or moved or stimulated me greatly. They have not been very “telling” tales for me. Too many have the same basic format: half-baked idea (HBI) meets big tough method (BTM). Big tough method makes improper advances to half-baked idea, grasping her in a loveless embrace. From their consummated union they produce lots of raw (and sometimes bleeding) little data (R(B)LD). But it is a hard world still, and before you can say “multivariate analysis” or even “SPSS,” these relative innocents have been induced to partake of more than a Student’s t, and are beginning to have knowing airs and graces, claiming a street cred know-how Telling psychological tales 11

(SCK-H) that shocks any old-fashioned genuine idea (OFGI) that may be passing unnoticed on the other side or left resting unattended on an adjacent library shelf. (For the truly scientific among us this can be expressed more precisely as

HBI u BTM R(B)LD SCK-H OFGI ).

However, I did find my reading of George Kelly’s volumes (Kelly, 1955) a genuinely exciting, moving, and richly stimulating experience. I was touched and spoken to in ways I did not really understand, while sensing something vital for me, liberating and inviting. But I was quickly sucked toward what my culture most allowed, the grid and its innovative possibilities for the measurement of meaning. If you will forgive the pun, the road to a hoped-for new science was to be paved with grid inventions! My feeling, sadly, is that very little that has been stimulated by Kelly’s writing has touched any part of that first, humming, electric shock of new or renewed life that coursed in me. I am led to wonder again at how so much theoretical promise (such a richly provocative story) could lead to so little that tells a tale that I can recognize as part of me or mine.

Some issues in relation to language and telling Over the past 50 years or more our understanding of language has changed greatly. No longer is language thought to picture nature and events in some direct way. No longer is language considered to be transparent to the meanings it carries about the world. No longer are words and sentences thought to carry particular meanings that can be relied on as stable from context to context. Instead, it is assumed that language is a woven tissue [of] interconnected similarities/differences whose meanings are given in this interconnecting network rather than in direct reference to separately definable features of a real world. Language is considered to be, in some sense, substantial, resistant, intractable. Words and syntactical structures assert themselves to draw speakers off in directions that do not necessarily say what they mean. Words have to be wrestled with and resist any easy alignment with our intentions. Language, and words in use, are recognized as being multiple in meaning, capable of alternative interpretations, leaving texts open to more than any single reading. How we speak is also important. What emphasis we place, what tone of voice or accompanying gestures we use, how we turn, and endlessly realign the seriousness of our utterance, all this can radically change what we relate and how we are in relation to ourselves and others in our worlds.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Telling and being told Our lives are, I think, shaped in the stories we live, and the quality of our experience is textured by the stories we tell and the ways in which telling is allowed. When a person is not able to tell her story she is impoverished and crippled. When a person does not hear herself reflected in the stories being told about her kind, she is deprived of elements of awareness that give legitimacy and perspective and a certain reality to her life. In psychology generally, we seem to care little for imaginative telling and give attention instead to the methods by which data are collected and transformed into certain kinds of accredited signals of legitimated meaning. I will be blunt. The kind of telling we undertake is often careless, crude, controlling. We do damage to ourselves and others in insisting on ways of speaking together that deny feelings, subtlety, humour, fun, and almost every aspect of sharing that gives quality to our lives. 12 Knowing and telling

As we tell, so we come to know. The less adequately we tell, the less adequately we know. It is toward telling that I want to repeatedly draw your attention here. Beyond this, the words and sentences we speak are speakers of us, as much if not more, as we of them. We ourselves are expressed in our language use and do not stand separate as users of obedient tools in our command. In this way language shapes us as we speak it. Any and every use of language is thus self-referring to some degree as well as referring to some aspects of our experience. Everything we say speaks of us as well as of some aspect of our world. Every speaking of world speaks of self as well. We are woven into and from language and cannot speak of anything in a way that neatly disentangles our involvement from what we are speaking about. Everything is tied back into itself. We are totally immersed in that which we try to explain and by which we try to explain it. It is our seeming clarity of understanding, at times, which is a major mystery. This issue was regarded as of crucial importance by Nietzsche, who was the first philosopher to recognize and accept fully the trapping, perplexing, and undermining implications of our total entanglement in language. He, indeed, was led to deny the possibility of knowledge itself because of the webs of contradiction, the shifting sands of meaning, in any use of language. Nietzsche regarded reflexivity, the complex issues of self-reference, as a burden we could neither carry nor throw off. It takes us again and again into paradoxical positions where no clear or single or firmly conclusive statements are possible. Everything becomes questionable in a variety of ways. Not only Nietzsche, but Heidegger and Derrida also write from within a fuller acceptance of the puzzles of reflexivity. For them a central issue was the replacement of the traditional modes of analyzing thought with a focus instead on language and language use. Their focus is on tellings, on the texts that reveal language in action. I am scarcely beginning to understand the issues of reflexivity they struggle with, but am struck forcefully by their powerful claims that what we know as knowledge is in jeopardy. These three philosophers, according to Hilary Lawson (1985), “do not merely seek to change our views, but to propose a new mode of thought.” Without intending to draw close parallels, it is this aspiration (seeking to propose a new mode of thought) that rings bells for me in relation to my first sensing of what Kelly, too, may be about.

Controlling conventions in psychological telling Keeping in mind this picture of our entanglement in language and the essential insta-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 bility of meanings in any use of language – and therefore in any claim to knowledge housed within that language – I want to ask how this is dealt with in psychology generally. How is it that little or no sense of this essential instability is reflected in most formal psychological tellings? Let us look at some of the more obvious ways in which things are being done in our acts of telling that make a difference to what we experience as receivers and inhabit- ants of these particular cultural stories. I want to claim that a number of devices are introduced into our conventions of telling in order to create impressions of stability, substantiality, weightiness, reliability, regularity, trustworthiness, safety, and security. These narrative devices seek implicitly to deal with many of the unsettling challenges now being brought into the open by those studying language. Such devices represent the old guard in the City Hall of psychological politics, or the politics of reality management. They rely not at all on Telling psychological tales 13

admitting the issues and thereby allowing the present power structure of knowledge manufacturing to be put in question. Instead, the old devices that still endure, almost unnoticed and largely unquestioned, involve a variety of bully boy tactics that are more reminiscent of fixes in smoke-filled rooms than of any kind of open politics. Consider a few of the things that are done regularly:

1 Right at the beginning, before the telling is read (if in a journal) or heard (if in a lecture) there are many narrative signals given to ensure that only the relatively faithful (to the kind of story being told) will make themselves available to the telling. Those who have different views on the politics of reality will read other journals and go to different conferences. This means immediately that the tasks of managing the candidates for belief are much easier than if those with very different views had also to be catered for. If representatives of every hue of opinion were allowed into every meeting or required to read every journal, there would be no progress beyond the first words. The first utterances of belief by members of some party other than their own would be greeted with howls of dissent, and sometimes derision. 2 In most serious, scientific psychological telling there is a careful setting of scene and platform management so that the final candidate for belief and trust is prepared for in the whole introduction, lighting, emphasis, and ordering of the argument. It is important to remember that, in any formal telling, the outcome is known before the story is even begun in a public way. It then becomes possible – necessary, some would say – to present a clear argument so that people are led to view the eventual outcome in ways the teller most wishes to stress, can cope with, get away with, make the right kind of impression with. We all know the panic of many research- ers who have no “good” results but must make it seem that years of work and funding came up with something! 3 No sooner has the telling itself started than one of many signs of loyalty to a particular cause is displayed. Any stating of a case, or creating of a context for the eventual revelation of the voting figures and the congratulating of the candidate, is supported by the teller announcing a roll call of the great and the already accredited who have, it is implied, supported by their presence in the text the claims, and the right to make claims, of this present presenter. It is important who is hustled in as an implicit supporter of the claims about to be made. You have to show that you have the right friend [sic], supporters, ances- tors, sponsors to be a claimant worthy of being believed. Those who are being displayed on the platform (in the text), usually in absentia (by a listing of names and dates), though sometimes also in quotation, are, it seems, lending their words or presence to carry weight when the same words spoken directly by the presenter

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 might seem like mere opinion. 4 While it is clear that every claim to belief in any psychological story has an author, a sponsor, any suspicion of self-interest is ruled out by implication (if not in fact) in the conventions of telling. The teller is not to be a character in his or her telling. There must be no narrative form which implicates the teller as the source. The words I or me or you must never be used. Not only must the teller seem to be the world, the audience must not be made to sense its own presence or its varying individual involvements in what is being offered for belief. In this way a transaction is to be arranged so that a storyteller, who gains status and credentials by observance of the many rules of telling, obeys the further objectifying rule that allows the world to speak to everyman/everywoman. No one in particular is speaking to anyone in particular here. This is something far more 14 Knowing and telling

basic and secure. Self-interest or any form of self-involvement is denied a place by the narrative rules, which simply do not allow their presence to appear! 5 Beyond this, the telling has to be done in such a way – following the conventions relevant to any group’s political preferences – that a certain horizon of expectation is created. In the experimental tradition, the telling is to create a world without colour or variation of light or shade. This is a place of standardized production where the careful following of standard procedures is shown in the ordering of the text, in the choice of words and terms that suggest impersonal and pretested orthodoxy and in the tone of voice that emphasizes the monotonous regularity of a factory shed (rather than the paint-smelling variety of an artist’s studio). All this is achieved by the manner of the telling, by the way in which much is excluded and much is said in ways that allow only the kind of place to be created, which speaks of order, regularity, uniformity of attention, planned progression, replication, and businesslike arrangements. 6 Then, of course, there is the method within the method of the telling. The teller makes it clear, by avoiding self-reference (other than by blazoning the name across the top of the article or in the conference program to ensure that the essential task of self-promotion will be achieved), that this is a tale in which the teller is not him or herself personally entangled. This device does not announce that the teller is not involved at all. Far from it! The teller has to tell a tale of his or her own ordering of affairs so that others (the subjects or voters) call the tune. It is the voters, not the teller, after all, who elect some candidates for belief. But this is only possible if the “right” procedures appear to be followed. Thus, the voters too are to be processed through particular ways of being allowed to have their say, so that the tale being told can house the claim that the teller has followed the procedures that constitute a fair election. Without interference, the voice of the people must be heard. In this way the teller has to show to his or her unacknowledged audience that the rules they live by have been (or seem to have been) obeyed and no one in particular then can make the charge that he or she has made a trivial claim to truth. It is the outcome of a fair election and therefore to be trusted beyond any claim by any particular person or party, even if the whole process has been arranged according to particular rules that allow only certain limited opportunities for telling by those whose voice is then to be taken as the most telling of all. Not only is the world speaking its truth through the teller, the people decide and it is they who, it would seem, have the final say (although elections have been known to be rigged in many ways). 7 Finally, for the moment, there is much that must not be said, much that must not be implied, much that must not be hinted at in any way. The telling must be done

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 with a straight face and a serious brow. This is no joking matter – certainly this is no joking matter! Almost every manner of speaking that might interfere with, or undermine, this serious tone has to be excluded. It is this gravitas that is to be the final guarantor of the trust that can be placed in what is being claimed, in the solid-citizen qualities of the teller and, by implication, in what is being told. Metaphor must be kept to a minimum. Its colourful, swashbuckling, disrespectful pranks have to be kept out of sight and out of mind. Sensitive minds are being addressed (and formed), and they cannot be expected to know what to make of a telling that does not sound safe, sure, simple, solid. Everything that trips and overturns must be left outside. Every hint of fun or play, irony or irrelevance, must be hidden from view. A story is being told that is to be accepted as the way things were, the way something still is, the way that thing may well endure. Telling psychological tales 15

Some aspects of Kelly’s telling Without going in detail through all the points just raised, it is worth noticing that George Kelly uses few of the narrative devices just suggested. There is virtually none of the marshalling of supporting dignitaries that most of us use to lend weight to our own timid claims. He refers to very few people who would then or now be easily identified as safe members of any particular psychological club. In the 1950s and 1960s his references to Christ, the Book of Genesis, Mozart, or Vaihinger would not have carried any sense of the trustworthy solidity that most psychological storytellers seek to stand beside. Although having similarities, in some places, to other psychological stories, his narratives are not structured in the way we were or are familiar with from other formal psychological tales. His “quickdried” postulate and corollaries have resisted digestion in any full sense for 30 years now and are still unfamiliar and unrepeated in other modern presentations. In his essays (Maher, 1969) there are so many forms that it is not easy to say what rules they follow, even after many readings. They are liable to leave me, at least, feeling queasily aware, at the end, that I still cannot call to mind any formula by which I can simplify the tale. Then there is his manner of address. He keeps referring to himself and to the reader. He is clearly a someone speaking to an imagined someone of some kind. This is no presentation of the world speaking through the people to any version of everyperson. Here is a voice steeped in the American Midwest, speaking with owned and intentional folksy, pawky, Whitman-like down-to-earthness. This is someone inviting you to know that all you have to go on in listening to him is his experience and yours! What solidity and security is there here? As regards creating a horizon of expectation, Kelly repeatedly creates a sense of time and struggle, of a plain man’s sense of richness in the religious myths that carry our best bets concerning our highest aspirations, the clarifying possibilities of mathematical thinking, the reminder that hints of ancient Greece may have relevance still to current psychological concerns, that the most radical reinterpretations of our common understanding are possible, and that there is a great venture of understanding on which we are engaged that demands and tests our courage as well as our imagination. This is no meagre setting but a place of danger, risk, and imaginative quest. All this is carried in the stories told and the way in which words are used to open, overturn, and offer alternative constructions. There are no hidden voters here, no fixing of the voting pattern in what is to be considered as somehow being so. What you work with is what is said by someone. Essentially this is a story between him and you. You make what you can of it by the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 means available to you, as he has made what he could of his experience in the story he manages to tell. His style of writing is often fluid, questioning, disturbing, uncertain, refusing to be pinned down to firm places of safety. He is humorous, critical in a kindly way. His essays sometimes reflect on their own construction. He certainly uses technical terms, but his richest writing is where his language reaches toward alternative ways of saying things that have become lost in too much familiarity. But there is more than this. Kelly’s texts become increasingly slippery as he reaches toward ways of telling his tale more faithfully. He becomes more circuitous, unsettling, indirect. In his later essays he allows less fixity than before, less solid security on which to stand. Much as he wants to be understood, he wants to unsettle too, to take the reader through experiences of disorientation that will not necessarily prove anything but will 16 Knowing and telling

be ventures that can be shared to some degree and reflected on (Kelly, 1977). By this stage we are far from a safely structured narrative in which we know what is what and where we are. There is more literary feel, more unsettlement, more coming in from different directions and toward often unclear ends. Here something other than a simple, authoritative tale is being told. There is a pointing on beyond to what may be felt or sensed in various readings of the lines. Things are in question. Settled safety is not the order of the day. This line of argument can be pressed too far, but I would suggest we are increasingly led through texts that are restless, open to interpretations, inviting us to explore other avenues and to refuse any easy resting in a single authoritative statement of what is so. Here we are closer than in much psychology to the instability of language and telling that characterize other texts that recognize the uncertainty of language and the paradoxical possibilities built into everything we claim. The issue of self-reference, of reflexivity, is an important matter here.

Reconsidering what Kelly was after If, as I am suggesting, the manner of telling speaks of how knowing is to be understood and of what is to be known, then it seems clear that Kelly was proposing a very different perspective on knowing and knowledge from the standard approaches in empirical psychology. His ways of telling draw attention to the articulation of experience and the possibilities of experience involved in ways of living. His ways of telling speak the voice of a someone and rely on the response of someone else for any weight they are to carry. They offer the possibility of a transaction between teller and listener. His concern seems to be to speak his ways of experiencing into partial being and require the other to find and follow similar and different possibilities of engagement, to make the meeting fertile. At no point does he bring forward some terminal argument or evidence by which to bludgeon obedience. His way of engaging in the search for trust is not to rely on a method – any particular method – but to engage in a continuing questioning and proposing of alternative ways of understanding that are like batons passed from hand to hand between him and others who run with him or who are waiting to continue the race. He is offering invitations to ways of thinking, feeling, acting, questioning, proposing, exploring. At no point does he offer ways of proving. Here is someone concerned in a different way from the usual nailing down exercise. He seems to be encouraging the development of a different kind of psychological endeavour, one that rests on telling careful tales that touch the lives of others and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 become telling for them and of them, so that they can begin to ask and tell in their turn and on their behalf, so that the flickering light passes from hand to hand, life to life. This sense of Kelly being up to something very different from our standard approach to psychology becomes stronger still if you attend to the multiplicity of hints he drops throughout his writing. I will mention only ten.

From the beginning he is disparaging about “nuggets” of knowledge, seeing them as a positive invitation to sweeping reconsideration. His concern with “transcending the obvious” stands in sharp contrast to the advocacy and production of the obvious in much of what we do. His emphasis on epistemological responsibility, on everyone taking personal responsibility for his/her way of knowing, is quite different from the endless Telling psychological tales 17

diffusing and shuffling off of responsibility that is characteristic of most of our formal telling. His recognition that everything contains its own contradiction (built into the Dichotomy Corollary) is in striking contrast to the attempts in almost every telling of standard psychological tales to appear to have things clear and uncontentious. His recognition of our personal involvement in everything we say and do contrasts with the continuing attempts to claim some high road to truth by way of devotion to an impersonally ritualized method. His emphasis on truth as always being a marriage of imaginative invention and felt necessity, never knowing anything for sure, stands oddly with the widespread impoverishment of imagination and fear of straying any distance from the authorized path. His emphasis on motion and movement is so unlike the endless desire to pin down and cut into pieces. His willingness to open dizzy perspectives of alternative possibilities is so different from the timidity of thought that the mass-production factories of knowledge now require. His suggestion that reality may be deep within us rather than all outside us, and that nature could be understood as everything we did not imagine as well as everything we did not venture, suggests a mind that flies rather than one that insists on plodding one proven and pinned-down step at a time. His concern for the power of exceptional moments as disclosing possibilities of being human, rather than the regulated ticking of what we insist on repeating, as the goal of our attentions is again to move us from the solid and recurring toward a life of greater uncertainty and toward trust of some different kinds.

All this combines, it seems to me, to speak into being – almost to speak into being – a startlingly different attitude, and points toward what the concerns of a telling psychology would undertake and be about. His method of reassuring us in this remarkable venturing is to solidify the basic propositions of his moving world in ways that convey a narrative density that makes even the most unsettling possibilities seem like objects for collection and repeated contemplation (almost like icons or mysteriously coded texts). He seems to be inviting us toward ways of being, doing, and saying that allow us to learn to trust in the movements of our selves/our worlds, rather than in endless attempts to stop the world and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 get off, from time to time, to examine it from afar. His whole attitude to inquiry is one of saying “not necessarily this” to any particular claim to reality, and “what if we thought of it this other way” and “might we consider what here is obvious as if it were a deeper mystery.” His methods, as outlined in his Handbook for Adventurous Inquirers (Kelly 1955; usually referred to as Volumes 1 and 2), are concerned with providing ways of recognizing what dangers may befall us and how we might conceive of how we are being trapped or traduced. In his fundamental postulate and corollaries, dimensions of transition, etc., he offers us conceptual and practical advice, ways of thinking and ways of doing that can help us see when things become dark and dare when we become too afraid. Here we seem to have both an attitude to knowing and practical aids to undertaking the tasks and dangers of pursuing such knowing. All this is a suggestion for each or any of us, not merely for us to apply to some segment of our professional life. 18 Knowing and telling

Here we are, I feel, dealing with a moral training, a psychology of moral action if you like. What is being suggested is the outline of a discipline that is, in Kelly’s (1969a) words, to be concerned with “the fullest possible understanding of the nature of good and evil.” This is patently a moral quest of endless challenge, with still unimaginably profound implications for every aspect of our lives. With his recognition of our intimate involvement in whatever we claim to know, Kelly understood that all our inquiries depend on who we are and what we are individually and communally able to bear, able to imagine, able to suffer, able to feel, able to endure. What is entailed in a realm of inquiry where self-involvement is inevitable in everything we claim is that it is only by changing ourselves first (as Kelly said himself) that we can change what we are capable of imagining and coming to know. What we have emerging here is indeed a moral science (Mair 1985). It is one that has to do with changing, challenging, helping, sustaining ourselves and each other in our means of questing, our ways of daring to imagine how things might yet be, so as to engage in a manner of inquiry that recognizes that only those who are able to go, are able to go; only those who can imagine, can imagine; only those who can endure, may endure. Some knowing will only be possible for those who become again as little children, perhaps. As you can see, this is beginning to have a religious ring to it. Many may want to back away here, but I believe instead that this religious dimension is precisely what has to be faced in Kelly’s invitations. It has scarcely been noticed to date, although there have been exceptions (Cummins 1988). The central issue here, I think, is the same as in Kelly’s talk of psychology as a science, and his concern with what science may yet become. He was equally questioning, I suspect, of what might yet be made of our ideas of religion. I think he saw both as vital modes of knowing. I suspect that for him “man’s quest for God” was as relevant to science as to religion. My impression is that he was unsettling, intentionally unsettling, our fixed categories of knowing, and seeking repeatedly to create conceptual mixing and even confusion as regards such categories as psychology, science, religion, and morality (not to mention philosophy, and probably other distinctions between disciplines, too). I believe he was reaching toward a genuinely new conception of psychological inquiry, which merges concerns from old notions of both science and religion into new meanings to allow a full-blooded, honest, maturing psychological way of engaging with our selves/our worlds without rigid allegiance to either the sanctified dogmas and rituals of scientific method or the objectifying, solidifying, codifying, tactics of so much religious belief and practice. I think he was reaching for a practical psychology rather than a theoretical psychology. In this, theory is a skeletal story to express lessons learned from experience, to give practical guidance to those seeking personally

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 to inquire beyond the limits of their present understanding, or the present boundaries of their disciplines where the border guards of conventional authority threaten, maim, and even destroy those who seek to go further than the power structure of our common fearfulness can yet allow. What we have mostly done is to seek to set whatever he said within strait jackets already prepared for us in our implicit understanding of what constitutes an appropriate conception of inquiry, an attitude to asking and answering. By assuming that Kelly and his culture were essentially after the same kind of knowing, the same pursuit of truth, we have acted on behalf of that culture’s powerfully restrictive stories (or meta- stories), which define what is to count as asking and answering, and how these are properly to be done. We have made sure that we did not reach toward the marvellous liaison, still all but unthinkable in the West, though not in the East, between a changed conception of science and a changed conception of religious search. Telling psychological tales 19

Both may be able to combine to create a mode and manner of human inquiry that could contribute something fresh, a moral science (housed within a language-based discipline of discourse) that depends on, and involves the continuing development of, adventurous, practical, humanist spirituality. In reaching toward such an uncertain but challenging goal, Kelly may also be returning us to our cultural beginnings, to our roots, so that as T.S. Eliot said in another context, we can know them for the first time. He could be seen as doing what the poet Rilke considered essential if an imaginative fertility was again to be available within him, recognizing that we must, again and again, return to the beginning. I suppose I have been suggesting that in our beginning is the word, through whose imaginative use we can tell what we may yet come to know.

Note 1 First published as Mair, M. (1990) “Telling psychological tales,” International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology 3: 121–135. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals). Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CHAPTER 3

THE PERSONAL VENTURE1

There are some things too painful for me to know. There are places too frightening for me to go. There is knowing that is too burdensome for me to seek. There are joys that are too intense to enjoy. There are flames of living too hot for me to handle, too dangerous to dare. Partly living is a safer way to be. Stepping aside, looking the other way, going somewhere else, staying well away makes it easier to bear. To survive, I have to ignore what I cannot endure. This practice of ignorance limits the pain of experiencing and if the world would only stand still I could perhaps know only what I want to know. The history of the world is as much a history of ignorance, of the practice and per- fection of ignoring, as it is a history of knowing and coming to know ourselves, the world. Every way of knowing is of necessity and at the same time a way of ignore-ance. Every pattern of sensing we create in the course of our lives is a way of responding to some aspects of the world and remaining unresponsive towards others. There is a widely shared myth at the present time, certainly in academic circles, that the pursuit of knowledge is a fine thing, and that ever so many of us are blandly engaged thereon. The assumption seems to be that a great many people want to know more and more. Not wanting to know, hiding from knowledge, is thereby a reprehen- sible sign of laziness, lack of motivation or stupidity. And yet I’m not sure how many of us really want to know much, if anything, beyond what we need to cope, to be acceptable to those others whose acceptance is needed if we are to get along reason- ably painlessly. While the pursuit of knowing is doubtless a widespread and enduring commitment of the human race, most of us, I suspect, do not want to know many things irrelevant to our ordinary lives and do not want to know if this will distress, disturb, destroy the securities of what and how we already know. And so you could see the vast outpour-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 ing of theses in Universities, for instance, as reflecting a few genuine questions posed more or less audibly towards the unknown, and many pretences at knowing, dutiful practice-runs in the arts of socially sanctioned ignoring, personal investments in the social benefits of showing that you have come to know what to ignore, and have come to understand how to pose questions honed towards appropriate ignorance. Thereby you are unlikely to be troubled by knowledge coming in any forms other than those structured by our presently acceptable blindnesses. I am not arguing here against the pursuit of knowledge. Rather I am trying to draw attention rather crudely to the necessary interweaving of our ways of coming to know and our ways of coming not to know. Any human activity can be pursued for purposes other than its apparent and expressed purpose. What appears to be the pursuit of knowledge may quite often be better seen as an equally assiduous and structured pursuit of ignorance. Whatever any person is doing is some part of a personal undertaking The personal venture 21

by that person in the context of his circumstances in time and place and society. Both extending and delimiting what we know and how we come to know are important and intimately related human activities. But in personal terms both knowing and not knowing are bought at a price, and the price is high, far higher than we have generally come to suppose. Neither coming to know or ignoring, which is anyway an aspect of knowing, are in themselves good or bad but can only be judged in the context of the human ventures in which they occur. What I want to talk about here is personal knowing, what it is to be personal and to know personally. This will provide a general background against which to consider George Kelly’s psychology of personal constructs and something of what might be involved in the struggle to create a personal psychology.

Kinds of knowing So far I have been using the word ‘knowing’ in a very undiscriminating way. Some attention to kinds of knowing is needed. In what I have said so far I have been referring to knowing as something far more embracing than the meaning often given to the term. Intellectual knowing is but one aspect of knowing. Many of our academic conventions lead us to pay almost exclusive attention to this aspect of knowing and so draw attention away from other forms of knowing. I want to draw attention to four modes of knowing – knowing that . . . , knowing how . . . , knowing as living personal experiencing . . . , knowing people. Knowing that such and such is the case or that this or that happened, is familiar enough to us. This form of knowing is concerned with identifying objects and things, with cutting up our experience into usable chunks which can be identified and assessed, examined and tested. Much of our vast accumulation of knowledge about the world is in the form of knowing that certain things are the case and that certain things are likely to happen under certain conditions. We could not get through any day of our lives without knowing that many things are reliably so. Much of science is to do with increasing our range in knowing that the world is reliably structured in particular ways. Knowing how to make things work or how to achieve certain ends is related but different. Here we are concerned with knowing in practice how to make things happen the way we want them to happen rather than simply knowing that things happen in a certain way. We are here dealing with knowing how to make a difference to aspects of the world according to our wishes. The development of ‘know-how’ or technology gives us practical control, power, the possibility of making things do what we want and turn out the way we decide. Again we could not survive without developing this kind of knowing of how to go about achieving particular ends we seek, rather than being the victim of circumstances which we might know about to some degree but not

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 control. I can, however, know that it is possible for people to fly with hang gliders and even know that this is so for very good aerodynamic reasons. I can know how to fix myself into the harness, how to use the controls to bank and turn, how to launch myself over the edge of the cliff towards the mercy of the wind. But knowing personally what it is to glide on the air, to commit your actual life to what you know, to those wings, to dare to step into nothing from this cliff, that’s quite a different thing. Here you are involved with your own life, not in principle or at second hand. This is knowing as living personal experiencing. You are at risk if you dare to know personally. Sometimes it will be exhilarating, fun. Sometimes hard, even tragic and you may need courage to endure, to survive. The focus of much academic knowing is on learning things which are of little or no direct relevance to the learners involved. Personal issues are involved for each of them, 22 Knowing and telling

but they may be to do with not letting parents down, climbing the present academic hurdle in order to set oneself up socially and professionally, establishing a certain impression of yourself in the eyes of others, proving to yourself or others that you are able to accomplish what you have always feared you could not. So with a focus on the academic topic, the personal quest of coming to know may be obscured and missed. But in talking directly of knowing as lived personal experiencing I want to draw attention to the central personal involvement in this act of knowing. What is happening here is happening to me, in me, by me. In personal knowing we are attending to something of what the person is centrally engaged in in his life, at the frontier of his experience, where he is most alive. At this frontier of experience, even in everyday affairs, we are considering the person actively daring to know what matters to him and where he is vulnerable to change. The practice of ignorance is specially inviting here where, very often, no one else will see and where you are alone. We should not wonder that a few lives only penetrate at all deeply into the possibilities of the personal.

Knowing people Knowing that and knowing how are both involved in knowing people as well as in knowing other kinds of events. Much of the impetus of psychology as a general discipline has been towards knowing that certain things can be claimed as true or likely to be true about people or about aspects of people. Similarly, much of applied psychology has been concerned with knowing how to help, shape, change, control, guide, persuade, modify, people’s behaviour and experience in therapy, institutional arrangements, work training, classroom learning and such like. It is when our ideas about knowing people reach no further than knowing that and knowing how that we are likely to become bad psychologists and particularly dangerous people. Knowing as living personal experiencing is also involved in knowing people. Daring to know, meet, feel for, be present to and with people, others and ourselves is analogous to being present in a living way in other circumstances of our lives. Much of what follows is an attempt to spell out a little of what seems to me to be involved in personal knowing. But first I want to draw attention to one feature of knowing people whose importance is, I think, often ignored or underestimated.

Being known One aspect of reflexivity not often stressed is that knowing other people involves being known or the possibility of being known. Being known is an intimate aspect of knowing and coming to know people. By this I mean more than the possibility that we will become known by others if we seek to know them. This itself has important implica-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 tions, but more important is the possibility, which I will make as an assertion, that only and in so far as we are known by another or others do we become ourselves and inhabit our own lives. Only as we are known and live into the knowing of others do we more intimately come to know ourselves and therefore more of what we can come to know in others. The importance attached by the scientist-psychologist to not being known while at the same time seeking to know about others and know how to influence their behaviour in predictable ways is highlighted in the traditional role of the experimenter in psychological studies. The experimenter is expected to be detached, anonymous, impersonal, bland, uninformative and in control. This is of course, in part, the psychologist’s attempt to imitate his hero, the physical scientist, but it also seems to me, to be a major step into the used but largely unexplored meta-psychology of purposeful ignorance which characterizes so much of what passes for the pursuit of knowledge in psychology. If we The personal venture 23

structure our means of inquiry such that massively important, though troubling, aspects of our legitimate subject matter are obscured and disregarded then we are engaged in the human venture of knowing what we want to know or what we feel we can handle. But in practising the necessary arts of ignorance we are here also belittling our subject matter to fit the Procrustean bed of our own competence. Nor is it unreasonable that in everyday life as well as in the structure of the psychological experiment we should so often seek to avoid being known. Knowledge is power, greater knowledge is greater power. Things known about become subject to the will and intentions of those who know about them. So often in our social life, and this is again quite explicitly reflected and even highlighted in formal psychology, people are out to predict and control their circumstances as much as they can so that they may themselves survive and succeed. So much of our knowing is of the knowing that and knowing how kinds, and since these especially focus our attention on gaining the upper hand on our circumstances, it is not surprising once again in the human realm to find that much of our attention is devoted to finding how people’s behaviour can be controlled and changed to fit the convenience or profit of others. In this kind of struggle for knowledge which gives power, the upper hand, it would not seem unreasonable to seek to know rather than be known. Where manipulation and abuse by others is anticipated it is reasonable to keep your own cards close to your chest while thinking of as many ways as possible of getting a peep at your opponent’s hand or so shuffling the pack that, all unbeknownst, the odds have been shifted in your favour, for a time anyway. Sometimes also, to be known is to see and sense your own behaviour in a different light. There is the threat in this that you will find that your ways of hiding truths from yourself as well as others are made apparent to you as well as others. One of the dreads in this is that you may be tricked, trapped or unarguably persuaded that you may be responsible for activities you had till then denied or ignored. You may find that you have been building and maintaining the prison bars and palace guards you have claimed were unfairly restricting your freedoms and limiting your achievements. You may find that in being known from a different perspective and in the understanding of another that your own carefully constructed angles of blindness towards yourself and your actions are bypassed. The afflictions you suffer as symptoms of some malady undermining your everyday life may come to be known as expressions of your own fearful avoiding of other and more painful pains you dare not experience. You may in all this begin to sense yourself as responsible for a wider realm than you had wished to know and being held responsible by others where previously you were in receipt of sympathy, pity and care. Once again, coming to know personally through being known by another can be seen as something not always to be lightly allowed. You may find yourself being expected to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 stand where you are only prepared to crawl or walk where you had convinced yourself and others that you should be carried. Being known, and coming thereby to know otherwise than before plunges us into the very heart of personal and social life, into questions of power, control and responsibility. No wonder we like to draw attention away from our ways of limiting what we dare to know, and often struggle to seem to be only what we are yet able or willing to undertake.

Knowing personally It is easy at times anyway, to get the impression that knowledge is something separate from the knower, somehow out there and apart. Michael Polanyi (1958) has pointed out that we seem to attend from some mysterious and unidentified centre to that which holds our attention. That to which we attend claims us with its reality, while that from 24 Knowing and telling

which we know remains invisible, unsubstantial, unrealizable. The realm of the personal includes the impersonal and is not antagonistic to it. The opposite of the personal is perhaps something like the unknowable, but the impersonal is only possible within the ambit of the personal. The impersonal is designated by persons. To be personal is not therefore to be subjective since the act of objectifying is a personal act. To objectify that which is set over against the experiencing centre of self, to set at a distance, separate from, hold apart, to distinguish from the ever active self are all means of being, ways of coming to know oneself, the world. What happens so often, however, is that in separating self off from formed events, the living in-former is forgotten and the events so formed allowed to parade as independent reality from which the person is excluded. The act of objectifying is lost and the objects of attention allowed to lay claim to a separate reality. In this way the whole realm of the personal can be shrunk, lost and ignored. Objectifying, instead of being a means towards a fuller understanding of the personal, can and often does become a way of ignoring, obscuring and denying the complex webs of our ways of being in and coming to know ourselves and the world.

Being personal It is one thing to suggest that all knowledge is basically personal. It is quite another thing to be personal. Much of the time we so organize our ways of living that we are scarcely involved in our own lives, we cut off or all but turn to objects of stone, large chunks of what might otherwise be living and often painful experiencing. We create and often get taken over by the masks we wear in so many situations. We have many modes of becoming impersonal, of impersonating what a person might be rather than being personal. I have suggested elsewhere (Mair 1977a) that it is sometimes useful to think of a person as a community of selves rather than a single self, a single entity. The successful businessman, for instance, may act here as a ruthless perfectionist, there as the devious politician, somewhere else as the indulgent protector. All of these selves, so to speak, will reflect something of him personally. Yet none may reflect how, sometimes and fleetingly, he feels most intimately in the privacy protected by his public faces. There he may be a weeping child, scarcely known, unrecognized, by all these partial impersonations he offers as himself. The weeping child remains through the years, unapproach- able by these competent, hard, successful adults who have grown up to protect and stand between the world and this vulnerable creature. In acting as they do, they allow the man to ignore and all but escape from this painful, needy, frightened, shameful little creature. It is as if the whole community of this man’s selves grows from and is organized so as to protect the child from direct meetings in the world, to protect the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 man from ever having to become that little child again, to cope in such a way that the reality of such a child will scarcely be suspected by others. The man’s life is lived through what he partially is, but scarcely if ever through where he is most sensitive. All our impersonations, objectifications, separations, distancings, can be seen as aspects of our personal functioning. But to be personal is to live and know in and through those aspects of yourself which are on the exposed and fearful frontier between your most vulnerable sensibility and the world of your experiencing. To live always in relation to warnings and evasions may be to survive, control and prosper. Most of our lives are, and have always been, taken up with just this kind of surviving. Very seldom do people dare to live personally, on the frontier. The struggle towards understanding of what may be involved in being personal has engaged man for thousands of years. This struggle, sometimes explosively creative, often timid and partial is what I would call the personal venture of man. But in every single life in whatever place or time it The personal venture 25

is not a communal undertaking but always a personal venture. Each individual stands alone when he or she inhabits, dwells in and lives from his or her personal space. It is when you inhabit and live from your uniqueness, rather than semblances which meet more logically the expectations of yourself or others, that you are being personal.

Personal inquiry In psychological research, the bowdlerisation of the pursuit of knowledge is often carried to exquisite lengths. Instead of encouraging the pursuit of questions of personal importance – that is, personal inquiry – research is often a mentally paralysed scramble to find something that has at least the form of a question so that something resembling an answer can be sought. Pursuing personal concerns in psychological research, making your research a form of personally important action, is incredibly hard for most people. Anyone confront- ing his supervisor with personally important questions is likely to be told that their question is too big or meaningless or not amenable to scientific inquiry or would take too long to answer. They are then quickly encouraged to turn instead to more conventional, safe, already trodden paths and methods which are known to meet the approval of the department staff and the conservatism of the likely external examiner. For the research student to battle on with what matters to him personally can and usually is a very lonely, often frightening and sometimes desperate business. If he refuses to accept other people’s questions and readymade solutions then he is likely to have to work much harder than others even to begin to formulate whatever the issues really are for him. It is so much more convenient to take issues already shaped in someone else’s terms from the literature. He is likely to have to struggle to find ways of separating himself sufficiently from the issues to begin to see what they are about. He will probably have to develop methods of his own to fit his concerns since standard off-the-supermarket-shelf approaches are unlikely to be adequate to his particular needs. He is likely to move quickly outside the area of concern, confidence and competence of his supervisors and many of his companions where he may feel lonely, abandoned and at times hopelessly lost and misguided. Through all this he is likely to sense more acutely than ever before the intense pressures being placed on him to take a more conventional line, to compromise, to be sensible. After all, he can always do ‘real’ research afterwards when he is not so bounded by the requirements and fears of the academic world to meet thesis standards. In this way personal inquiry is often stunted. What is involved in personal inquiry is again and again side-stepped. This kind of issue in the context of research is of course repeated daily in ordinary life. Am I to compose my sufferings in the shape of other people’s remedies or sing my

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 own longings against the closed incomprehension of others? Am I to listen to the telling of your story and risk the destruction of my carefully formulated securities? How can I possibly trust the uncertain whispers of my own experiencing against the clearly articulated reasonableness of what so many others continuingly repeat?

The cost of being personal Often in everyday life, in mental hospitals, in psychotherapy, in psychology and psychological research I believe we grossly underestimate the cost of knowing personally, of personal inquiry. To undertake any personal venture is to start from and return to your own experiencing, your own ways of sensing, feeling, shaping. You are essentially alone in this, even though you may well want and need to make reference to the values and standards of others often and longingly. But the opinions of others cannot, however authoritative and 26 Knowing and telling

impressive, be a final or crucial basis for judgement and choice in the realm of the personal. To venture personally is often lonely and unsupported, sometimes actively resisted by others. You are likely to lose your familiar contact with segments of the social reality which has served to keep you in some recognizable space in the social geography of others and yourself. To venture personally can be a demanding, painful, exciting, frightening thing to do. It can be so because on this frontier, everything is new, again and again, always new. You cannot shield or prepare yourself with the armaments of yesterday. When the next step is taken you are again naked, at the beginning, unsophisticated, on your own. In knowing in the impersonal mode of the personal we are taught how to separate off parts of ourselves so that only a delegated contact is made with the issues which confront us. In coming to know through lived personal experiencing we are plunged into a much more complete involvement. Personal knowing takes all of you, all your sensibilities are relevant. Body as well as brain, feelings as well as intellect, reaction as well as reflection are involved. Knowing in this way calls on your life and not just a little corner labelled ‘research’ or ‘education’. Knowing personally involves you in changing, in giving up something of who you were for who you may become. It means loss of old moorings and fixed boundaries and the repeated possibility of the loss of who you have taken yourself to be. It means sometimes the disruption of settled social relations and expectations. It means facing guilt in the struggle to determine for yourself in all honesty what is good and what is evil now, for you here, at this time, rather than taking it for granted as given in labelled social packages. In all this you have to pay now, again and again. There is no postponement or buying your experiencing on tick or by credit card. Suffering as well as joy is involved. No wonder I certainly, and we generally, do very little of this kind of venturing. No wonder we search for ways of avoiding the issues and softening the blow, and hope to achieve control without pain and rewards without responsibility. To venture personally, even in small measure, takes courage and requires persistence. It requires humility and readiness to give up the old forms that circumscribe your security for new shapes which may emerge in honest meeting with new circumstances. Often you will have to survive by some kind of thin line of trust sustained by whatever strength you can muster. Fear is the ever present enemy and the ever present terror that in stepping with your life into the unknown you may lose everything you have as well as everything you are. All this may seem exaggerated and unlike everyday notions of knowing and change. My claim would be that this is because so seldom do we venture personally beyond the already plotted conventions of our place and time. We have come to associate inquiry with tedium, with the meeting of imposed expectations and regulations rather than personal danger.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 A personal psychology What, then, may be involved in developing a psychology of personal knowing? It is just such a question, I believe, that George Kelly tried to answer in his psychology of personal constructs (Kelly 1955). I also believe that the kind of undertaking involved here is still largely beyond our understanding, partly because Kelly himself was not able to spell out the full scope of what he was trying to create. Whatever might be implied in talking of a personal construct psychology remains obscure and largely ignored. Yet, I suspect, Kelly’s crucial contribution lies in preparing the ground and building some of the foundations for a personal psychology. He was, I think, struggling to put his fingers under what was and is generally accepted as psychology and quite literally shake the old foundations, suggest a different kind of discipline and ask a different level of question from those previously asked. The personal venture 27

In suggesting that Kelly was attempting to create a psychology of personal knowing I want to suggest also that he got only so far along the road in doing this. His concern with knowing is apparent in his fundamental postulate and corollaries, in his central concern with procedures of personal experiencing, in his claim that his is a methodological theory and in his underlying metaphor of ‘man the scientist’. However this metaphor, because of the way in which we presently conceive of science has resulted in the theory being labelled a ‘cognitive’ theory. In this way it is recognized as being about knowing, but is conveniently shrunk into theory of thinking rather than of the whole man. Kelly was mainly concerned with the kind of knowing I have referred to as living personal experiencing, though also with knowing how and knowing that. He clearly recognized the enormity of the issues involved for mankind as well as for particular men and women. In his essay on ‘Psychotherapy and the Nature of Man’ (Kelly 1969b) he uses the story of Adam and Eve as a metaphor of the devastating and profound implications of seeking to live by understanding rather than obedience. In seeking to become like gods and grapple personally with the knowledge of good and evil our prototypic man and woman lost the comfortable protection of ignorance and gained access to the pains and uncertainties of the venture of knowing. In the myth too it is recognized that knowing involves undertaking guilt, labour, suffering and sweat as well as the fearful freedoms of choice. Kelly, in using this old story, indicates the continuity of man’s struggle for personal responsibility in knowing, and suggests that human issues involved in personal knowing have been confronted over the centuries in different guises. While science at present is the focus of man’s quest to know, for thousands of years this human venture has been grappled with under the heading of religion. So what does any of this imply about central issues in a personal psychology? For me it suggests that a personal psychology will require involvement and reflection thereon. It will be equally concerned with our ways of knowing and our ways of not knowing. It will necessarily start from what matters to someone and be evaluated in relation to what it matters for. Important questions are something like, ‘What is involved in knowing or coming to know or in ignoring and coming to ignore?’ or more simply, ‘How do we know?’ At present most of psychology is built on the assumption that we already know the right or best ways of coming to know, and these are enshrined in ‘the scientific method’. But this is not adequate for a personal psychology. What is at issue is our ways of knowing and not knowing, how we formulate and pattern our engagements with events. The radical challenge which Kelly poses to psychology is in suggesting that its present reliance on acceptable, already given and handed down methods is the problem and not the solution. We do not explicitly know much about the means by which personal inquiry, personal ventures in knowing, are undertaken. The problem facing a personal psychology in detaching itself from general psychology is akin to that faced

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 by the church during the Reformation. Instead of accepting the authority and rituals of authorized priests as knowing the only route to salvation, the reformers claimed each man as his own priest. The challenge posed by Kelly is all but spelled out in analogous terms when he claims each man as his own scientist. Each man has intimate, if inarticulate, experience of personal knowing and ignoring and if man the knower is to rise above man the scientist he needs to find ways of asking himself and others, ‘How do we know?’, ‘How can we know?’

Knowing and meeting I am not sure that a personal psychology would look much like psychology as we know it now since it is pitched at a different level and questions the very ground we presently stand on. We have been through an objectifying phase of inquiry and many have now 28 Knowing and telling

plunged into a subjective mode. But a personal psychology will be no more a subjective discipline than an objective one, it would be concerned with coming to know intimately as well as peripherally or formally, it would be as much concerned with creative description and formulation of experience as with drawing conclusions from the outcome of action, it would be as much an art as a science and concerned with coming seriously to know, by whatever means can be developed, something of the danger, pain and patterned procedures of personal knowing. But personal knowing involves being known. In a personal psychology our ways of engaging with each other and ourselves are at issue. Part of the immediate problem of a personal approach to knowing is that we need to develop ways to address and listen to our own experiencing, as well as hear and understand what others are saying in their actions in relation to their circumstances. We need to learn to use and trust and value and explore a language of feeling and give voice and shape to our inarticulate know- ings and engagements with each other. A personal approach to knowing is therefore inevitably social, but goes beyond a concern with social roles and strategies to a deepening concern for persons in relation, their possibilities of meeting and coming to know each other centrally rather than at a distance. If we are to find ways of exploring further the nature of personal knowing and meeting then we are going to need alternative metaphors for guiding and sustaining our inquiries. It is here that Kelly seems to me to have stayed too close to the model of science which centres round the experiment as the pivotal experience. While wishing to retain this, I’d want to ‘kick the experiment upstairs’, as Kelly did with the concept of ‘learning’, and accept that personal knowing is necessarily experimental, necessarily about experience and lived into action. In doing this I believe we need some further model of inquiry which will help us to penetrate more deeply into what lies between us, to help us to meet and come to know what is involved in being known. A personal psychology will need to formulate itself around some basic understanding of inquiry which, from the very beginning, accepts that we create our understanding in relationship, between us, rather than as separated scientist constructing an edifice of specialist knowledge in the terms accepted only by his own fra- ternity. We need some basic model of inquiry which includes involvement, recognition of equality of significance, personal meaning, exploration and progressive sharing of understanding and confusion, giving as well as receiving, knowing as well as being known. Thus a personal psychology might well need to incorporate some modes of inquiry which stood in relation to more traditional psychology as ‘conversation’ does to ‘interview’ or even ‘interrogation’ or as ‘loving intercourse’ does to ‘casual prostitution’ or even ‘rape’. In this we will be involved across the boundaries which at present divide clinical from social psychologists or experimental from speculative, physiological from cultural. We are likely to be concerned with addressing and conversing with works of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 literature and art, religion and warfare, as well as with each other and ourselves. Such a discipline, whatever it turns out to be, will reach towards meeting without manipulation and will be founded on personal ventures in knowing. It should help us to respect our ways of ignoring as well as care for the possibilities of personal meeting and the kinds of change which are involved therein.

Note 1 Reprinted by permission of Elsevier and Ingrid Mair from Constructs of Sociality and Individuality (P. Stringer and D. Bannister (eds.)), New York and London: Academic Press, Mair, M. ‘The personal venture’, pp. 35–47, Copyright 1979. PART II

RHETORIC, DISCOURSE, AND CONVERSATIONAL INQUIRY Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 This page intentionally left bank Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CHAPTER 4

PSYCHOLOGY AS A DISCIPLINE OF DISCOURSE1

This chapter begins with a discussion of various layers of meaning now associated with the term ‘discourse’. Particular attention is paid to one aspect of discourse, namely the notion of ‘dialogue’. Some of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogue are outlined, leading towards his emphasis on life, itself, being dialogical by its very nature. The author then articulates some of his own activities in psychotherapy, identifying various ways in which aspects of discourse are involved in his daily practice as a ‘professional conversationalist’. He then spells out an agenda for developing a psychology viewed and approached as a ‘discipline of discourse’. He finishes by indicating some of the implications of this perspective.

What is ‘discourse’? The Shorter Oxford Dictionary provides a number of meanings for the word ‘discourse’: communication of thought by speech; talk, conversation. The faculty of conversing or a talk, a conversation; narration or a narrative; a spoken or written treatment of a subject at length; familiar intercourse; to talk, converse; to discuss a matter; to talk of; to tell. You will gather from this that discourse refers to anything spoken or written (including stories of all kinds), talk, narrative, narrating, telling, conversation. It is a general term to cover a lot of the kinds of things we do most of the time. But the word is also used more widely than this. It is increasingly used to refer to all sorts of non-verbal, as well as verbal, means by which meanings are conveyed or symbolized. In this wider sense, how we dress, how we move in relation to each other, the ways our houses are built and furnished, performances of all kinds, manners, cus- toms, institutions, everything which ‘speaks’ of meanings in our social life is part of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 the meaning of ‘discourse’. Beyond this, too, there are further meanings which now attach to the word ‘discourse’. So far, all the definitions given have been fairly neutral or bland, but in much recent work on ‘discourse’ (e.g. Macdonell 1986) the term is powerfully marked with political implications. Many writers suggest that discourses are not at all peaceful. They ‘clash’, they are at odds with each other and even at war. Because of this, there is a political dimension to every use of words and other symbolizing forms. But there is more still that clusters round the term. Catherine Belsey (1980) relates discourse to ‘ideology’. She says:

A discourse is a domain of language-use, a particular way of talking (and writing and thinking). A discourse involves certain shared assumptions which appear in the formulations that characterise it. The discourse of common sense is quite distinct, 32 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

for instance, from the discourse of modern physics, and some of the formulations of the one may be expected to conflict with the formulations of the other.

She goes on to insist that:

Ideology is inscribed in discourse in the sense that it is literally written or spoken in it; it is not a separate element which exists independently in some free-floating realm of ‘ideas’ and is subsequently embodied in words, but a way of thinking, speaking, experiencing. (Belsey 1980: 5)

All this means that we are all engaged in discourse at all times, when we are speaking with ourselves and when we are conversing with others. In all this we are also, then, involved in the politics of discourse and being shaped by the taken-for- granted ideologies which characterize our local and wider culture. All of this is very much the subject matter for psychologists and psychotherapists, as for many other disciplines too.

Mikhail Bakhtin on discourse and dialogue I want now to attend to some of the ideas of one literary theorist, with a special interest in one important aspect of discourse, namely its ‘dialogical’, or as I would prefer to say, ‘conversational’, nature. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) has been described (Todorov 1984) as the most important Soviet thinker in the human sciences and the greatest theoretician of literature in the twentieth century. He had wide-ranging interests, including certain aspects of psychology and sociology. He proposed a unitary view of the entire area of the human sciences, seeing all of them as concerned, in one sense or another, with ‘texts’, and having methods which emphasize interpretation or ‘responsive understanding’. Bakhtin considered that a specially important feature of the ‘utterance’, or any aspect of discourse, was its involvement in ‘dialogue’. What I want now to do is to give a flavour of some of Bakhtin’s views through a number of quotations from his work (all taken from Todorov). I should like you to think of what is being said by this literary theorist in relation to your understanding of psychotherapy or psychotherapeutic psychology. He suggests that the object of the human sciences is not just the person, but the person as producer of texts. He emphasizes that the domain of speech belongs to the social order, not merely to the individual, and that language (which is also social) is constitutive of human existence. He also claims that the utterance, or discourse, is not Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 an achievement of the speaker alone, but the result of his or her interaction with the listener, whose reactions he or she integrates into what is being said. Now for some direct quotations:

The utterance is constructed between two socially organised persons, and, should there not be present an actual interlocutor, one is presupposed in the person of a normal representative, so to speak, of the social group to which the speaker belongs. Discourse is oriented towards the person addressed, oriented towards what that person is. (1984: 42) Discourse (as all signs generally) is interindividual. All that is said, expressed, is outside the ‘soul’ of the speaker and does not belong to him only. But discourse cannot Psychology as a discipline of discourse 33

be attributed to the speaker alone. The author (the speaker) may have inalienable rights upon the discourse, but so does the listener, as do those whose voices resonate in the words found by the author (since there are no words that do not belong to someone). Discourse is a three-role drama (it is not a duet but a trio). It is played outside of the author, and it is inadmissible to inject it within the author. (1984: 52)

Bakhtin also suggests that discourse does not maintain a uniform, enduring relationship with its object: it does not just ‘reflect’ something, but organizes it, makes a difference to it.

In reality, the relations between A and B are in a state of permanent formation and transformation; they continue to alter in the very process of communication. Nor is there a ready-made message X. It takes form in the process of communication between A and B. Nor is it transmitted from the first to the second, but is constructed between them, like an ideological bridge; it is constructed in the process of the interaction. (1984: 55–6) I cannot perceive myself in my external aspect, feel that it encompasses me and gives me expression. . . . In this sense, one can speak of the absolute aesthetic need of man for the other, for the other’s activity of seeing, holding, putting together and unifying, which alone can bring into being the externally finished personality; if someone else does not do it, this personality will have no existence. (1984: 95) All that touches me comes to my consciousness – beginning with my name – from the outside world, passing through the mouths of others (from the mother, etc.) with their intonations, their affective tonality, and their values. At first I am conscious of myself only through others; they give me their words, the forms and the tonality that constitute my first image of myself. . . . Just as the body is initially formed in the womb of the mother (in her body), so human consciousness awak- ens surrounded by the consciousness of others. (1984: 96) I achieve self-consciousness, I become myself only by revealing myself to another, through another and with another’s help. The most important acts, constitutive of self-consciousness, are determined by their relation to another consciousness (a ‘thou’). Cutting oneself off, isolating oneself, closing oneself off, those are the basic reasons for loss of self. . . . It turns out that every internal experience occurs on the border, it comes across another, and this essence resides in this intense Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 encounter. . . . The very being of man (both internal and external) is a profound communication. To be means to communicate. . . . To be means to be for the other, and through him, for oneself. Man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary; looking within himself, he looks in the eyes of the other or through the eyes of the other . . . I cannot do without the other; I cannot become myself without the other; I must find myself in the other, finding the other in me (in mutual reflection and perception). Justification cannot be justification by oneself, confession cannot be confession of oneself. (1984: 96) Life is dialogical by its very nature. To live means to engage in dialogue, to question, to listen, to answer, to agree, etc. (1984: 97) 34 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

My activities as a psychologist and psychotherapist While I want to draw your attention towards literature and literary theory (of the kind just quoted), I want mainly to speak of and from my experience as a clinical psychologist with continuing involvement in psychotherapy within the National Health Service in Britain. Bearing in mind the comments already made concerning ‘discourse’ and its necessary involvement in ‘dialogue’, I want to begin to highlight how some of the issues involved have a bearing on my everyday work. When I look at what I actually do, I have to conclude that I am a professional conversationalist of sorts. I spend all my time in conversations of different kinds, some face to face, some in writing, some with individuals, some in larger gatherings, some (very many) with my self (or rather my selves, since there are many voices which constitute who I am and am becoming, who do not go along quietly with what others ‘outside’ or ‘inside’ may be urging or claiming). What is called ‘psychotherapy’ could be called ‘psychological conversation’. In that context, I/we have conversations of many kinds, at varying levels, and in differing modes (sometimes enacted rather than put into words). In these conversations, stories of many kinds are told and listened for. These stories may be broken fragments seeking some greater flow and coherence, or overworked coherence needing to be infiltrated with risk-filled questioning rather than tidied up with imprisoning answers. I do a lot of listening to the stories others tell. I listen for the different voices within the voice, to hear who is speaking under the guise of ‘I’. I listen for who has the right to speak and who is deprived of rights to say and know. I listen for the breaks in the offered ‘text’ of a person’s account of who and how they are, so that hints of other stories, other selves, other ways of feeling and being can be offered a, sometimes never before granted, chance of articulation. I chip in, suggesting another scrap of story line that might, equally well or better, be woven through the events of a person’s life. I suggest other ways in which something could be said, drawing attention to the possible value of trying a different tone of voice, a different style. I suggest other stories, sometimes mini-stories, sometimes stories which offer a wider and different view, that the person with me could begin to tell themselves. So often I and others entrap ourselves in endlessly disparaging and debilitating accounts of who and how we are, spat out at ourselves with silently persistent venom. Quite often, research psychologists and technically self-congratulating therapists are rather disappointed with the answers they get when they ask patients or clients what they got from therapy. Rather than thanking their highly educated, technically skil- ful, theoretically esoteric therapists for whatever particular wonders may be supposed to derive from all these professional competences, something quite simple-seeming is

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 almost always said. ‘Being able to talk to someone outside the family helped’, ‘I’d never been able to say some of these things before’, ‘Talking to someone who listened, and seemed to understand, helped a lot’, ‘Getting some of these things out where I could see them made a difference’. Such people know, perhaps better than we, that telling your story matters. Having someone who can listen and engage with the stories which constitute who you can claim to be, gives a new sense of reality sometimes, a sense of being more ‘rounded’ or ‘whole’. In speaking with such care, with feeling, searching to find ways to speak anew, we are at the forefront of ourselves, in the midst rather than far away. In speaking beyond the boundaries of story-telling conventions that have so far held sway in your life, you may enter the fearful lands where your human world is in the making, becoming other than it was. This is a place of danger and fear, risk and adventure. How we relate ourselves to our worlds is being reformulated. We are being changed, in part at least, Psychology as a discipline of discourse 35

from being fearful ‘conclusion’ to becoming forms of ‘inquiry’, a question worth asking rather than an answer that cannot be endured. And it is not just what is told and how it is told, it is the very act of telling, the speaking itself, which seems to matter. In the act of speaking I become a different being. In becoming a little more articulate about some aspects of my experiencing, I articulate myself in relation to an ‘other’. In speaking myself to and with another, I may gain some sense of ‘authority’ that was not there before. I become something of an author, not merely a character, trapped in stories that have been told in other places and other times, and which have constituted the world of my subjection. However, I am being diverted from what I do in my everyday working world, and it is important to note that it is not just in the context of ‘therapy’ that the issues of ‘discourse’ are to be found. In committee meetings and planning meetings, management meetings and department meetings, I am involved in conversational worlds, each with its own rules and politics, its own developing manners of speaking, ways of relating, forms of life. Beyond this, I write stories of many many kinds: to GPs about the lives of ‘patients’, to managers about the contributions of myself and my colleagues, to lawyers about their clients who are in trouble, to myself about the things I cannot yet say, and want to reach towards speaking. Then there are the special kinds of stories I write, every now and then, for professional journals. With these, you have to be sure that you are following the appropriate story-telling conventions for that particular vehicle of wider professional dialogue: but then, that applies to each and all of the other contexts of story-telling conversation that I have already mentioned. Beyond this still, I read and interpret, break into, disturb, question, undermine, seek to understand all sorts of stories that are told to me in all these different conversational contexts. How strange it now seems that my training did not focus almost completely on stories and story telling, composition and imagination, reading and listening. How strange it now seems that ‘discourse’, in all its forms, was not central, that the many modes and forms of conversation which seem to constitute my daily life were almost completely left unspoken.

An agenda for psychology as a ‘discipline of discourse’ Psychology as a discipline of discourse is concerned, then, with how we ‘speak together’ in word, deed, manner and constructions of many other kinds. It is concerned with the diversity of discourses we live in and are shaped by, use and are used by. When so much of what I find myself doing seems so easy to describe as directly to do with all of this, why is it that the idea itself is so hard to get hold of and to make into a living reality? The answer is, I think, surprisingly simple.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 The kind of psychology I am talking about is almost a mirror image of the kind of psychology which holds centre stage at present in our culture. A discursive, conversational psychology takes as crucial what most empiricist, fact-finding, experiment- reporting psychology suppresses almost entirely. We are dealing with a different way of looking at what matters in human affairs (Mair 1989b). I shall mention a few topics which would have to find a central place in any training programme for psychology approached as a discipline of discourse. In each case I shall try to point towards some of the other disciplines, topics, areas of knowledge, which would become relevant for us. Perhaps I need to stress, before going further, that I am not setting this psychological perspective up as a replacement for much that we already do. I see it rather as a necessary complement, a way of taking ‘on board’ more that we need if we are to create more adequate, ‘rich’, ways of accounting for human action and experience. 36 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

1 We need to take a different approach to language from that which still seems to be common in psychology. In a discipline concerning ‘discourse’, language and language use are central. Rather than assuming that language, and how we tell of what we are about, is invisible and secondary, it becomes crucial and of immediate and continuing concern. At present, we seem mostly to assume that language is virtually transparent, and that we can see through our words and sentences to the things in the world that we are focusing our attention on. Words are still often assumed to be like transparent containers of fairly specific meanings. The speaker puts the meaning he or she intends into particular words and then sends them across to the listener who unpacks the meaning from the word containers, before selecting other word vehicles to contain the meanings they want to send in response. In this view, words, and language generally, are quite secondary to the facts and things that they are pointing towards. Provided you then speak in a plain, down- to-earth fashion, so that ‘flowery’ verbal excesses do not distract attention from the realities being focused on, there is little problem, and the search for real truth can proceed apace. This whole view is wrong and must be abandoned. Language is now recognized, by those who have been concerned most closely with it, as a very different kettle of fish from this. No longer is it assumed that words and sentences gain their meaning from some direct reflecting of things in the world, but rather from the internal relationships within the language system itself. The relationship of language to ‘reality’ has become much more questionable. In addition, language has to be regarded as ‘substantial’, rather than ‘transparent’. Words and syntactical structures throw their weight around, they push speakers towards saying and recognizing what the language structures imply. They are resistant to individual use and have to be wrestled with, if anything other than the most conventional local ways of putting words together is to be achieved. Words and structures in language shape us more than we shape them. We are vehicles for the conventions of language more often than we are achievers of something more unique. All this means that we have always to be attentive to what language and its forms are doing to, through, for and against us. We cannot rest content with the assumption that we are, more or less, in direct touch with how things are, with our ways of speaking being merely convenient workhorses of our intentions. This leads us into the whole area of linguistics, and perhaps especially into the linguistic theories developed by Saussure and those who have followed him (Cohan and Shires 1988). 2 We need to be much more attentive to creative modes of telling so that we continu-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 ingly struggle with alternative ways of putting the things which we are creating, and not just reporting, in the way we speak together. Writing and speaking with imaginative novelty are needed in undertaking and composing accounts of what goes on in psychotherapy. Almost nothing of what matters in the worlds of psychotherapeutic conversation can be summed up in the drab conventionality of our present psychological language. This will lead us to a concern with literature and art, poetry and metaphor. Psychology has to become an art or it will never be a science of the kind which is needed, if we are to come to understand more of the fluid, enmeshed, socially and culturally immersed complexities of human life. 3 We shall need to attend to narrative and story in all their forms. Every day and in every way we are telling ourselves and others stories of how things are, of where we are, of how the world is made. We have to account for ourselves and our Psychology as a discipline of discourse 37

actions. We have to spin yarns of many kinds to weave ourselves and our worlds together. There are many different kinds of stories told by different groups, different tribes. The life of each cultural tribe (whether clinical psychologists, psychoanalysts, psy- chiatrists, lawyers, managers) is sustained in the particular stories by which they justify their place in the social world. Each tribe has its own conventions for telling their kinds of stories in their way. No other kinds of stories have the same claims to truth in their eyes. Not only this, but we live in and are shaped and constituted by the stories of our culture, which have induced us into the rituals of humanity in our locality. Stories of past ages live through us and make us aware and blind, competent and incom- petent within the limits they define. All this leads us towards those aspects of literary theory which concern narrative and poetics, as well as to social theory, history and anthropology (Mair 1989c; Selden 1985). 4 We shall need to be concerned with how we tell, as well as with the content of stories or their formal structure. Here we shall be plunged into an intimate concern with what we are up to as we compose what we are saying in our words and deeds. The ways in which we arrange the ‘lighting’ and ‘scenery’ on the set; the ways in which we struggle to ‘come out of the sun’ and from the ‘higher ground’, so that we can defend ourselves and our forms of tribal life; the ways in which words are arranged so as to touch and quicken, soothe and deceive; the ways in which our presentations of ourselves are ordered so that the effects we seek may be achieved – all this is important in everything we say and do in our jostling for survival in our discursive worlds (Mair 1990). All this leads us into the realm of rhetoric. The importance of this ancient discipline (Dixon 1971) is again being recognized in renewed forms. A huge amount of work is being done in the human sciences, and in other contexts, to rethink the whole enterprise in line with the new understandings of language and discourse (Simons 1989). Some are suggesting that a renewed rhetoric may be the most appropriate meta-discipline, since we are always speaking ourselves into being, composing and constructing in our stories what we are and what we mean. 5 We shall need to attend more fully to listening and reading. If our lives are constituted in conversation and spoken in stories of many kinds, then we are always involved in listening, interpreting, making what sense we can. Further attention here will lead us to work in literary criticism of both more traditional kinds and the more recent work in deconstruction (Norris 1982, 1983). In deconstruction, a breaking into the structures of language is undertaken, which pays little heed to the more traditional concerns with getting a sense of the work

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 being considered, or a proper understanding of what the author intended. Instead, the story, writing, presentation of whatever kind, is broken into through ways of examining what the language is doing, virtually against the speaker or writer’s will. Deconstruction seems to involve a variety of ways of approaching what language is up to in any person’s use of it, rather than being concerned with the author’s particular concerns. Beyond this, work concerning the response of the ‘reader’ may be useful (Fiske and Hartley 1978; Holub 1984). 6 We shall need to attend more directly to conversation or dialogue. In everything I have said, conversation is the context of all our lives. We live in the midst of conversation. We are conversational beings. We are locations where the conversational practices of our place and time are enacted. Conversations are not just to do with the passing back and forth of information. They are habitations wherein 38 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

different forms of life are made possible, sustained or shrivelled. In psychotherapy, there are endless opportunities for attending to the creation of different conversational worlds, different kinds of habitation, which allow different ways of feeling and being to be encouraged and disallowed.

Making a way in the world If a psychological discipline like this is to survive, it has to engage in conversation, dispute, struggle, seduction with many other existing realms of professional discourse, and those who service them and live through them. Confrontations of many kinds are inevitable and cannot be painless. In relation to most approaches to psychology, mutual understanding is likely to be limited. So much in current psychology pushes us towards chopping up and objectifying bits of information which can be transformed by statistical juggling into claims of an impersonal and ‘hard-edged’ kind. Such a dominant discourse will not sit comfortably beside the kind of language-based approach I have been sketching. Current psychology is afraid of imaginative speaking and writing and afraid of narrative. It insists that what it is doing is ‘getting to the facts of the matter’, and is certainly not involved in ‘mere’ story telling. In relation to psychotherapy, all will not be sweetness and light either. So many psychotherapeutic approaches are individualistic and ‘private’, concerned with the inner experience of the client. They are often blind to the wider social situation in which problems are created and our present psychotherapeutic arrangements sanctioned. This alternative approach, through discourse, is certainly concerned with many of the things we currently do, and could contribute new understandings concerning what we are about, but it does not rest there. It is bound to reach beyond the therapy room and into the world of competing stories, ways of telling, organizational arrangements by which some are given rights to speak and others are denied. A discursive psychology would inevitably be political and social, deeply engaged in the sweeping cultural issues of our times and minutely attentive to the ways in which individual lives are ‘inscribed’ with the power politics of those organizational structures which control the way things must be seen to be. In relation to the whole world of literature and literary theory, many alliances may be forged, but there, too, things will not just be comfortable and companionable. So much in the current ferment of philosophic, literary and rhetorical adventuring is posing major challenges to much that is held dear by the liberal/humanist/romantic traditions, which still inform much that is thought and done in psychotherapeutic psychologies. Profound challenges are being posed concerning what we understand by knowledge, and questions raised as to whether our socially accredited methods of ‘proof’ are anything more than special pleading and persuasion, ‘making us offers we

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 can’t refuse’. Our views of ourselves and what it may mean to talk of ‘selves’ and ‘subjectivity’ are under threat. Claims to authority and privilege, built into the dominant stories of our cultures, and given power by the social machinery which enforces them, are being questioned on many fronts. We may not want to go down some of the paths our new-found allies may have prepared for us. All that remains to be seen. In relation to the wider world of ‘the market’, so much seems to be dragging us towards simplistic, brutal, quantified and costed ‘packages’ of saleable procedures, rather than encouraging any worthy or serious approach to understanding or caring. Managerial psychology of an authoritarian kind (the very kind which so many in main-line psychology seem to have been working hard to produce for many years) is all the rage, and its ‘rage’ may do profound damage before it blows itself out. Easiest of all would be to fit in, compromise, make the most comfortable pacts we can with this crass barbarity. But that is not what is needed. Psychology as a discipline of discourse 39

If a worthy and imaginative psychology is to grow from the kinds of concerns that the best psychotherapists have so long valued, we shall have to turn towards, rather than away from, the sounds of battle. We have to find ways to clarify and defend the kinds of conversational space we need, and from which we can speak with power of what is going on, of what we and others are up to. It is in relation to aspirations such as these that a discursive psychology, which is inherently social and political, recognizing our total immersion in the life of our place and times, may have a significant part to play.

Acknowledgements This chapter was first published in the British Psychological Society, Psychotherapy Sec- tion Newsletter, No. 7, December 1989, pp. 2–12.

Note 1 Published as Mair, M. (2000) ‘Psychology as a discipline of discourse’, European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health, 3: 335–347. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals). Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CHAPTER 5

CONVERSATIONAL RESEARCH AND CLINICAL PRACTICE1

My aim is to provide a broad introduction to what I’m calling Conversational Inquiry. I will not deal here with practicalities of the ‘how to do it’ kind. I want to try to conjure up a different view of psychology from that which is still fairly standard. In this I hope to suggest a mode of psychological inquiry that gives central importance to speaking and telling rather than counting and calculation. In doing this I am outlining a perspective that is still fragile and emerging, not something well established. Nevertheless I will make positive statements throughout so as to etch the main lines of the picture rather than including the many qualifications that should be added at many points. As you read I’d ask you to attend mainly to the drift of what is being said rather than probing each particular. Let yourself feel for what I’m saying, as well as thinking of it.

Some reflections on what I am about This will not contribute to another area of standard research, nor even suggest a slightly different way of doing slightly different research. What follows is not to do with ‘research’ in the usual sense. It has more to do with ‘searching’ and ‘searching again’, a continuing questioning of what we so easily assume to be settled. In the kind of searching and searching again that is proposed here, the primary concern is not with published end-products but with sensitizing each participant to some of their own ways of attending to, composing and telling their experience. It is a ‘terrorism of attention’ that I seek rather than another ‘manufacturing industry’. Basically I want to find a way of taking more of myself and of you into account. This will mean taking more of what goes on between and amongst us into account, more

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 than we are expected to do in standard psychological science. In most traditional psychology I feel excluded and impoverished as a person and reach for some chance of enrichment through a psychology that is still to be created. Such a discipline will have to stand differently towards its task and allow us to attend and speak differently of ourselves and the many kinds of meetings between and amongst us. I have to start from what I know and experience for myself. I speak from my own limitations. I am thick, dull, ordinary, conventional. I feel trapped in my own limitations. My involvement in psychology and psychotherapy is part of my personal struggle to reach beyond the obviousness of my own understanding, which I know to be small and mostly banal. I am held tight by the culture from which I come, and even in my moments of rebellion am still enacting its well tried ways. I mostly seek freedom by asking and taking the advice of my prison guards. Conversational research and clinical practice 41

It is against this pervasive tyranny that I rebel. I am aware of my servitude just enough to know that I am being kept blind and deaf and dumb. It is against this wall- to-wall carpeting of the obvious in my own nature that I occasionally hit out. It is all but a hopeless task. The very means by which I am able to inquire are themselves but an expression of that which holds me. Everything is compromised. Only occasionally can I sense something of what silently envelops and pervades my life. No experimental or standard methods will help free me from the shaping which shapes me and these methods too. The battle for some different kind of understanding of my circumstances is never ending. It can only be borne for some of the time. It is always too little and mostly too late. As soon as some small degree of understanding comes, it becomes routine and again hides the freshness that now lies beyond its conclusions. Mine is a position of continuing questioning, always seeking alternatives to the most commonly offered understanding, the accounts of ‘how things are’ that have the approval of our ordinary awareness. It is an occasional, but liberating freshness that I seek. The more true I can be to myself in this, the more likely it is that I will also speak for some others. We are shaped within similar cultural demands, whatever differences of particulars there also are. What is most personal is likely to be most general. We need to find a variety of ways of carrying out ambushes, terrorist attacks, surprise visits, unscheduled meetings with that ordinary world that hides the wires and pulleys which guide our everyday activities. My aim is to be a do-it-yourself Robin Hood of ordinary experiencing, waylaying the self-satisfaction of the obvious to uncover its precious nature. My concern is to share with the ‘poor’ of our deeper needs (for understanding and participation) a less familiar sense of our own and our world’s moving realities. Nothing that I have to say will make life easier, or happier, or even more efficient. It is troublesome and is likely to make you feel more of an outsider to your conventional culture than may already be the case. It can, however, be satisfying, exciting at times, playful, sensuous, as well as being frightening and liable to make you more aware of how insecurely we are located in our place and time. It will require some kind of courage and strength, as well as tenderness and delicacy of touch.

Some reflections on clinical practice It is of such importance, at certain times in psychotherapy, to ‘tell it like it is’. It is of such felt-significance to put language around an experience properly. ‘Saying’ that is too crude or slanted in ways that blunt important distinctions or shades of intention, can distance and damage. The ‘rightness’ here is in relation to the experiencing of another who can show in word or manner that it is ‘right’ or variously ‘wrong’.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 In psychotherapy there is the attempt to revive ‘speech’, the speaking context, the conversational reality. There is a concern to create personal history as present once again, retrieved from timeless suspension. The intention here is to do with revitalizing, reviving, refreshing our experiencing so that we can bear to undertake lived motion, rather than remain trapped by our continuing thrust towards dying, surrounding ourselves with the hard husks of former hopes. Symptoms can be seen as ‘speech’ reduced to blind event. The ongoing conversation of a particular place and time, all its particular meanings and located significances, get compacted into ‘signs’ of a different order of intention from those that were lived particulars. This different order of intention, which displaces and bleaches out the historical, the located and the lived, is a culturally sustained and sanctioned level of non-responsibility. It is, perhaps, a way of putting a comfortably deceptive mythology in place, with its concerns not to rock the boat, to obscure differences, convert painful intention into 42 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

mere happening, individual struggle into physical necessity. In place of qualitative differences in individual lives we create culturally stunted metonymies, compacted signs, with an accompanying loss of moving metaphor. My concern with ‘speaking well’ is not just because it is so important in psychotherapeutic practice, but has to do with the kind of psychologist I wish to become. I am not happy to remain either as a psychotherapist or a traditional psychologist. I want something more for myself, for my colleagues, for my clients and for the wider community which we all share. I want to become a psychologist of a different kind and at a different level. I aspire to being an ‘intermediary psychologist’, one who seeks to participate in intimate human struggles and then tries to act as a cultural ‘go-between’. In this, I want to speak from within my involvement in the lives of many people, whether as clients or in other contexts, so that the human significance of what is enacted amongst us may be shared more attentively. In seeking this I want to cherish lives, to set them in special light (as a painter or a poet might), so that they ask and say of who and what they are. So may they receive renewed attention for the particular qualities they show. I don’t just want to cure or help. I want to conjure value of different kinds. I want to see and sense ordinary lives in some different way, set in a different landscape from the usual ways in which we lose them in the routines of clinical management. I want, in George Kelly’s (1977) tantalizing phrase, ‘to transcend the obvious’ in speaking of shared troubles in renewing ways. In finding myself expressed in this, still indistinct, aspiration I am faced with many difficulties. Three of these are of special relevance because they bear on my own experience of psychotherapeutic research and psychotherapeutic practice. First, I do not find much inspiration in either the research results or the standard model of research adopted in relation to psychotherapy. Like many other clinicians, I can say with conviction that I do not believe I would be a significantly worse therapist if I knew nothing of the research output in the last twenty years. I do not deny that there is a prescriptive kind of research which seeks to ‘test’ packages of procedures, and that those who believe in the ‘best buys’ being recommended as a result, can put some version of them into practice as part of what they do in therapy. This, however, is not what many therapists do, and no single identical replication is ever undertaken by anyone, including the original investigators. I suspect that most psychologists who are therapists do not get much help in many aspects of therapy from either the outcomes or the procedures of our present research paradigm. I suspect, also, that we never will because we do not and cannot agree about what we are doing and because we all function in complexly different ways in the fine grain of every relationship we enter. I see no hope for me in learning much in relation to the things I value concerning people or therapeutic meetings, even if the present kind of research endeav-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 our is multiplied many times. Worse than this, I believe that our present concern in Clinical Psychology to view ourselves almost exclusively as an Applied Science is a major stumbling block. Amongst the various faults in this way of conceiving of our activities, there is the specially important one that the attitude stifles on-the-spot, moment-by-moment, innovative thought and communicative action. It encourages generations of bright and sensitive people to abandon their spontaneous possibilities for creative responsiveness in favour of the dull regimentation of yesterday’s results, the cold remains of someone else’s diet of packaged imagination. All this suggests to me that we have a limited, and eventually inadequate notion of how we might question and modulate our ‘speaking’ in therapy. We are trying to catch the river in jam jars, and end up with no more than small quantities of increasingly stale water, with little sense of the flowing beauty of its source. Conversational research and clinical practice 43

Second, I am aware that I too am trapped in a dumb servitude to almost everything in therapy that seems to deny me access to how it may be known and spoken into a recognizable and felt life. After more than twenty five years as a clinical psychologist and therapist I feel I have learned almost nothing of what is going on in the quicksilver world of psychotherapeutic meeting. I do not mean by this that I have learned nothing in practice. Placed in the practical situation with a client, I think I am less often at a loss; less often do I have unrealistic hopes or unrealistic lack of hope; more often do I feel able to bide my time till a way forward begins to open; more often do I have some confidence in trusting what I feel being done to and through myself as messages of what is happening for the other in some analogous sense. Yet so very little of this can adequately be seen and said in ways that catch the life of it. I have no way of speaking that world of engagement other than in fragments, such as metaphors and images. It is a world that has somehow been drained of language, and in being so depleted it becomes mere ‘there-ness’, lived and worked within but invisible and unspeakable, essentially unknown. It can only be known more explicitly by having its possibilities-in-language returned to it or created for it so that what has been banished, or converted to voiceless, taken-for-granted context, mere necessity, can become recognized as lived intention. All this spills over to our clinical meetings where we try to tell each other of what we are doing. Almost all we are able to do is to tell standard stories of problems, techniques and supposed solutions. Mostly what is said does not speak into living form the hidden realities of the meeting and non-meetings of therapy. We remain mostly held in routine familiarity, without enlivening surprise. Third, and in addition to all this, I have the persistent sense that in every psychological clinic in the land, in every working day, almost everything that we could be learning and communicating to others in society about the human condition in our place and times is being wasted, left unnoticed, thrown uncaringly aside. It seems so obvious (though it has taken me many years to notice) that it is not just individual secrets and problems that we hear. It is secrets of our society, and the many pains and fears of our wider world. Yet, somehow, most of this potential haul of social relevance is being lost from whatever wider uses it could have in our world at large. It is as if we were using sieves of the wrong mesh size, or templates that were only shaped for certain currently expected patterns, to do with ‘personal problems’, ‘individual anxieties’, ‘illnesses’ or ‘psychological disorders’. In seeking only these, we may be missing some deeper lessons. Whatever else there is here of life and society is again invisible to suitable wording. It escapes the necessary metaphor of language, and so piles into unnoticed mountains of lost opportunity. It is as if someone especially valued is repeatedly being invited to a party and then repeatedly ignored. Opportunities are

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 seldom taken to get to know, to meet and create something new together, which might speak a different theme to our community.

Reconsidering our relationship with the world How is it that most of what I implicitly know in the context of psychotherapy is invisible and out of my grasp? To find an answer here I need to recognize that our relationship to our world, to reality, is fundamentally different from how we conventionally assume it to be. I think we suppose that because we are physically able to wander free of each other, we are therefore psychologically separate and free. Certainly since Descartes, who set the thinker over against the world-thought-about, and narrowed our understanding of thinking itself, we have increasingly supposed ourselves to be outsiders to our own world. 44 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

We are not, however, separate individuals set over against and above the world. We are totally embedded. If we are to achieve human freedoms rather than technical controls, it will not be by pretending a separateness that only confirms our given prejudices. We have to learn to question where and how we are arrayed within the context of our place and time. We need a radically questioning and subversive psychology that speaks of the conversational web which sustains us. We are totally enmeshed in our world. We delude ourselves in our supposed separation. We are not ‘free agents’ but ‘located participants’ in worlds we did not choose, in cultural contexts we did not create, and a language which has shaped and shapes us in everything we do. We are in it over our heads. Everything we see and think and say and feel is shaped by what we have inherited. All of this has also shaped us to attend in the ways we do, and not in others. It is surely part of the task of the psychologist (certainly of the Con- versational Psychologist) to seek to notice more clearly our place and manner of array, to help us to stop deluding ourselves as to our supposed freedom, to help us to know more of what is shaping us and how we endlessly in-form what we attend towards. Our manner and ways of looking, asking, answering and justifying are taught to us and imposed upon us so that we can scarcely sense that any alternative is seriously possible. Difference from our standard ways and manners of confirming our cultural worth are all fiercely resisted by our culture’s need to preserve itself against the possibility of disruption. We can acknowledge some different ways as ‘second division’ manners and means which are acceptable for more trivial pursuits, but not for the serious grandeur of Science, which has become our culture’s mainline God. We are totally embedded in the conversation of our place and times. Its diverse strands weave the texture of ourselves and our social world. A psychology of total immersion requires that we create ways of recognizing and speaking of our place and what we are up to. We have to find ways of speaking our worlds rather than speaking from the conventions by which space is denied and perspectives are depleted, disallowed, disconfirmed. This is a different world from that of supposed distance and objectivity whereby we have tried to count ourselves out, and have sought to deal with everything as a problem to be solved by applying impersonally determined answers. This world is one of many differences and must not be reduced to another version of what we already know and do. We have to recognize that we live in many worlds and that worlds are brought into and out of being by us. We need to come to some more ecumenical psychological perspectives so that we can question and explore the embeddedness of worlds, rather than try to continue in hostile determination to say that our corner is all and best. It is in this context that a Conversational Psychology will have a place. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Different assumptions for psychology Very different assumptions are possible concerning our knowledge of ourselves and others. The currently dominant assumption is that we know almost nothing except for a few, flawed, ‘common sense’ notions that allow us to get by in a state of primitive ignorance. We have to do experiments of a formal kind before our scraps of homespun wisdom can be given the seal of approval as scientifically attested. This version has it that, as outsiders to the world, separate and distanced from the rest, we have to find out painfully and slowly by the proper methods, what sorts of beings we are. We have to build up slow traceries of formally tested knowledge if we are to know ourselves more surely. An alternative is possible. This is in line with the notion of ourselves as totally immersed in our cultures. The assumption here is that we know almost everything Conversational research and clinical practice 45

there is to know about the culture in which we function, and therefore of ourselves and those around us as creatures of that culture. This is enacted knowing, knowing by which we spontaneously do what is appropriate and recognize by our participation in what we share what others mean in most of what they do. In this view we implicitly know almost everything that our corner of culture allows and our task is to find ways of recognizing what we already participate in and know as lived personal experiencing. There does, however, seem to be some cultural vanishing trick which repeatedly makes unspeakable (in any vital sense) almost everything that goes on between and amongst us, in therapy as in life. Because we are grown from the inside of our culture, much that we do competently and easily is so completely ordinary that it is quite invisible and ungraspable. It can be spoken only crudely, as if we were wearing giant-sized boots on our tongues, or huge, Mickey Mouse gloves on our hands. There is some powerful incapacity that overtakes us so that we do not notice, or formulate, or say, or even sense, or bring into the light of day what is being transacted there. Steeped as we are in the culture which breeds us, we learn first and continually, to enact our necessary parts. Only gradually and sometimes are we able to speak ourselves into some knowledge of what we are up to and how we are being formed by what we have taken so completely for granted. If we are to know more of our captivity, we have to find ways to conjure into recognizable form something of where we are and what we are doing. We do not just live in physical space. We live in the habitations of our conversational practices. We know so much more than we can say. We are cultural through and through. We know much of our local ways of being human. If we are to recognize something more of this we need to lower ourselves further in and learn to conjure up images of ourselves and our circumstances. It is a new rhetoric that we need, a psychology of narration. It is towards conjuring into being some fragments of hard won and easily lost freedoms, some extraordinary moments of refreshed vision, that a Conversational Psychology will reach.

Speaking to know Language can be used in many ways. It can be just a routine mouthing of the easiest platitudes; it can involve effort and sincerity, but be no more than a social signal to warrant our utterance as acceptably serious; it can be used to obscure, to mislead, to harm and brutalize. But it can also be used to create ourselves and our relationships anew. It can be used in a constitutive way whereby we speak reality into ourselves and our human world. For this kind of speaking you need a poet’s and a painter’s eye, a story teller’s craft. Because we are totally embedded in our language and our world we have to constitute

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 ourselves in the telling image, spoken into being in some form of language. We cannot speak from an outside position of ourselves or our constituting world. It is relatively easy for us to say things in the ‘steno’ language of Journal papers, which is a code of behaviour of a fiercely conventionalized kind. In this sort of speaking we do seem to be under the power of an implicit belief that words do say what they mean; that words do mean something in themselves, that words said in however dull and hackneyed a way will dish out their content of meaning. We seem almost to believe that words are words and they will perform their knee-jerk acts of meaning-mongering however casually they are treated and however routine our relationship with them has become. But words have to be loved and remembered. They are not any more capable of eternal youth than are we or our relationships. They need to be worked at and enjoyed. Their relationship to other realities is analogical and not transparent. They are a mode 46 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

of material, like paints and clay. With them, some representation and constitution of experiences can be given a different form of reality. In psychology we have been taught to make only crude use of language. Why is it that I keep longing for a way of more perfectly saying my world, saying the world between us, speaking you to your world? It is surely a longing for intimacy of an all but unreachable kind. To speak with sensuous ripples of understanding is a far more intimate form of knowing than much sexual intercourse even, where the persons involved may never be in other than a functional relationship with each other. Words are not describers of events. Words are constitutive of the reality they allow us to realize. They are not in themselves that reality, but they are constitutive of the reality we can experience and know. They come forth from the consummated marriage of experience in language. In speaking, in the very saying, we make and remake ourselves. We really create routes and boundaries. We touch hands and exchange looks of love. It is a form of love and a form of knowing that is involved here. It is intimate, attentive, caring, caressing, startling. We have to be available, responsive, to create by being present with. It is a form of love to care so much for saying. It is not any kind of saying but a saying that refreshes, that recognizes where we are and how we are arrayed. It is a form of saying which tries to get it just right, which makes us and others available in new ways, which gives freedoms where there were none. Words are not transparent to reality. Words are substantial things that speak their own community. Telling is a special category of events, not just a secondary function by which we share already formulated knowledge. Spelling out, speaking and writing, involve a new material. We find out about ourselves by relating to what we say in various ways. We don’t just say what we already are. The relationship between ‘telling’ and ‘being’ is not generally a matter of putting into the ladles of words the broth of what we already are. That kind of metaphor is quite inadequate. We have rather to become the butterfly of words in order to give birth to the eggs of new caterpillars of meaning. But again, it is not so simple. Words allow many kinds of offspring. It is not a single species that they offer. Words also travel and preserve, they give substance and shape, they speak to us and for us. In speaking together we create a new realm of reality in conversation. Words, phrases, sentences, discourse are the specifically human, ‘new’ reality. Because we are born amongst them we do not easily recognize the separate reality they create. Speaking, telling, accounting, writing, constitute us. It is not that we produce them. We are in a different relationship from that. We are constituted by them. There is a realm of substantial ‘telling’ from which we grow ‘inwards’ and ‘together’. We are created in discourse and made into what is possible for us through the kinds of discourse we have relationship with. When there is no speaking we are absent.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 We feed on discourse. Words are food. Words are eggs and sperm. Words are windows. Words are probes and pincers. Words are catalysts and curtailers. Words are almost anything you care to imagine. Words are imagination in particular forms. All sorts of metaphors come alive in words and our particular relationships. We see by words. We grope forward in the darkness of our complete embeddedness by the light of new metaphor. In speaking in this way we inhabit our questioning. The writing and speaking are not primarily for reporting but for touching, constituting, exploring. The telling is the question and the challenge. It is not secondary to truth that is already there. The telling tells its own tales. The telling is different from the thing told about (in Saussure’s terms (see Culler 1976), the signified slips underneath the signifier). In the telling the story grows and changes. It can become its own thing. Telling is itself a special way to inquire. Conversational research and clinical practice 47

What I am saying here may be related to some of the themes in the 18th Century Italian philosopher, Vico’s New Science (see Verene 1981). He describes that as a ‘science of narration’. It is a science that aims to present the inner forms of life of humanity in language. It requires that rhetoric be understood as a science of narration which can grasp the necessary particulars of the human world. Rhetoric, for Vico, is not a way of adding decoration to what is separately known to be so. It is rather an activity in which the mind constitutes a knowledge of itself. In narration, a particular subject is constituted for thought and at the same time what narration is is constituted for thought afresh. Vico believed that once narration as a form of knowledge is excluded, no philosophy of society or authority is possible. The psychotherapeutic context is so important because it is one place where deli- cate saying, attentive listening, the bodying forth of the invisible world between and amongst us, is allowed and struggled with. It is probably true to say that psychotherapy is almost entirely about the quality of experience and speaking. Yet in our ways of inquiring into quality we almost always force it into shapes that are again dictated by the barrack square mentality that likes neat rows and easily counted outcomes. We have a terror of quality, of texture and variety. We are afraid, I think, because it requires that we enter worlds of images and stories, poems and paintings. We are dealing here with a radically different sensing of the world from that made more familiar to us by Bacon and Descartes. It requires a different manner, a willingness to hear and say. This whole new world (new as far as psychology is concerned) is frightening and demanding in ways we have not been helped to endure. It requires courage and attention, a willingness to be given over to feeling and the embarrassment of saying how it feels. For me, this whole world of possibility collapses from time to time when the weight of the ordinary world presses silently on it and I give way. Possibilities of the kind suggested here do not then exist. Until I can find a way to get behind my words again, rather than find them standing over me and reducing me still further, they are lost and I am too.

Conversational practices It is not just ‘speaking’ that I am speaking of here. It is not a matter of separate individuals voicing, in whatever medium of language, their separate concerns. We are woven into and from our culture. We are inherently social, composed of many voices, not standing as isolated units in a physical world. What I am claiming is that how we speak together is how we live. We participate in the ongoing conversation of our place and times in everything we do and think and feel. We shape the space and texture of our lives in what and how we speak together and do not speak together, in how we speak ourselves and are not able or allowed to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 speak ourselves. My focus is not on persons but on conversation, or locations for conversational practices. It is on the between and amongst, not on objects or individuals that I want to focus. It is in the manner and possibilities of ‘betweening’, not on the characteristics of a person or the contents of some container. I want to see where we can get to by taking attention away from individuals, persons, units, objects, and trying instead to imagine myself into the shapes between us, the moving world of the interstices, the synaptic gaps of our lives together. This requires something like a figure/ground reversal. What has traditionally been left invisible and taken for granted is to become more focal. But all telling involves listening at the same time. There are always silent listeners to shape the telling, and tellers to shape and give substance to listening. There is some significant sense in which the telling is in the listening and the listening is in the telling. Telling needs to be received, and is only a real telling when it is substantially received. Telling 48 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

and listening are always situated in place, time, context, language, intention, relationship. Telling and listening are always partial, local, perspectival, directional, embedded. What I am claiming here is that conversational practices create our worlds. Put more formally, I would claim that we create realities by and through the conversational practices we are involved within and undertake. By ‘conversational practices’ I mean more than the use of words, and include all our ways of organizing, signifying and enacting our meanings. What this statement implies is that there are human realities that are constituted and made available through our acting tenderly with each other that are not possible and not to be dreamed of if we only act harshly or carelessly to each other. Our different ways of speaking and listening to each other create possibilities of experiencing that are probably infinitely variable. If we deal impersonally with each other, or within ourselves, we create and have available only the kinds of human realities that that manner of relating allows. In our impersonal and tightlipped methods in standard psychological science we create the kinds of realities we then claim to be impartially exploring. That manner of speaking together is a peculiar kind of conversational practice which yields its own fruits. But every other manner of being together allows its own possibilities of meaning that may be quite beyond the reach of our coldly dismissive experimental methods. This whole perspective then encourages us to attend to the manner of our speaking together, our ways of speaking and listening to ourselves and others, rather than giving a blank cheque of approval to a particular set of methods, such as the traditional ways we have been calling ‘scientific’. In this concern for the conversational web within which we live, a Conversational Psychology would seek to explore the kinds of human realities made available in different manners and qualities of meeting. It would not be so hood-winked by convention as to assume that some single manner of relating, asking and answering, had claim to general validity. In our varying conversational practices we create and abolish space for living. We encourage and discourage qualities of experiencing that are only possible if we recognize that the manner in which we say and do has fundamental importance for what then becomes possible and real. Different forms of personal space (Roger Poole (1972) calls it ‘philosophical’ or ‘ethical’ space) are created amongst and between us and not just as the achievement of separated individuals. There are powerful manners of obliterating space of many kinds. In what we call Depression, people sense a lack of space. If I am depressed or stressed in other ways, I may say – I need space; I feel hemmed in; I feel trapped; I feel crushed; I feel floating and unbounded; I can find nowhere to rest; I am homeless; I don’t feel I belong anywhere. It is not physical space that I am talking of here but linguistic space, space to think

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 and feel and sense things differently. Yet we are often afraid of space, space for doing the things we claim we want to do but keep postponing. We are perhaps afraid of space because it makes such demands on us, it offers opportunities which are also threats and challenges. It requires that we be given over to the likelihood of effort and the possibility of difference. Finally, I want to suggest here that we have to abandon any notion of ‘conversation’ as the kind of to-and-fro of a ping-pong game. This kind of back-and-forth notion rests still on the idea of separate blobs making some kind of external contact with each other. A different kind of mother-metaphor is needed here. One that might have value relates to the ideas of ‘space’ and ‘place’. It may be fruitful to conceive of conversation and our conversational practices as places of habitation wherein different forms of life are conceived, nourished and sustained or variously poisoned and prevented. Conversational research and clinical practice 49

Between and amongst us we constitute the habitations of our daily living in how we speak together. We build for ourselves and our community forms of dwelling houses and places for protected play. We similarly arrange that our lives together may become places of grim correction and harsh rejection. Heidegger (see Steiner 1978) spoke of language as ‘the house of being’. I am suggesting that in our conversational practices we constitute our places of human habitation which determine the quality of our lives and deprive us of possibilities they do not recognize.

Aspects of conversational inquiry I have to emphasize again, for myself as well as you, that I am not trying to offer some variant of conventional research methodology. Conversational Inquiry is not primarily about end-products but about the process of undertaking it. It is a discipline, or a variety of disciplines, which contribute to the qualities of the inquirer. These disciplines have to be enacted, they cannot just be talked about or pointed to as effective means for arriving at particular kinds of outcomes. Rather than using the term ‘research’, it may be nearer the truth to say that I’m concerned with spiritual or personal exercises, personal disciplines of attention and telling. Much in what I imagine here has more similarity to certain kinds of prayer and meditation than formal methods of research. Everything, however, hides its own nature. Conversation is the context of all our inquiries and yet it always becomes invisible. It is so obvious and yet is almost entirely out of reach for our everyday attention. What we are doing always seeks invisibility so that it is taken for granted, becomes routine, unquestionable. If we could keep questioning how we are questioning, the answers to our initial questions might not seem so secure or worthy of comfortable trust. Any method we use itself becomes, of necessity, invisible as we attend from it to what it allows us to see or touch. It is because of this that no standard method is possible for a Conversational Psychology. It is necessary not to be regular and predictably systematic. It has to be possible to be variable and surprising, coming from different directions and speaking from within unexpected patterns of meaning. Conversa- tional Inquiry constitutes a variety of attempts at being attentive to aspects of our total immersion in the conversation of our place and time. Probably we will get what we pay for in psychology, as elsewhere. If we grasp and snip at human affairs we will end with bits and pieces that can be grabbed and snipped. If we give a lot of time and attention we may not have the ability, sensitivity, discipline or imagination to make much of that, but we will give ourselves some chances. If we rush in and out with scarcely a glance, we can be almost certain that we will end with very little. The danger is always there of being sucked back towards what is known and easier.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Between us we compose worlds we are willing to inhabit, and disallow worlds that we cannot or do not have the will to sustain. Mostly, I fear, we do not want to meet more than a little and for our easiest ends. We do not want to pay the full price. We would rather get off as lightly as possible. We are addicted to paying bargain basement prices and hoping that we are buying genuine articles of much greater worth. Eventually we convince ourselves that what we are thus buying so cheaply is precious, despite all appearances to the contrary. Like the ‘neurotics’ of our society, amongst whom we must count ourselves, we are inclined to pay very highly in some way that is not relevant to what we are seeking. We then suppose that by paying such a price, in headaches, seemingly dutiful compliance with crippling conventions, testing many Subjects, suffering many complex statistical calculations, we will have merited knowledge and wisdom that can only be acquired, if at all, by a different kind of paying. 50 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

In Conversational Inquiry there are prices to be paid which our standard methods of research do not help us to pay. Just as a writer has to write, and a painter paint, so a Conversational Inquiry requires that we speak and listen. We have to learn how to be attentive, to give ourselves over to sensing the ‘other’ in more than our usual, functional ways. Immediately, though, I find myself in the realm of my own failures and fears. These cannot be avoided. They cannot be sidestepped by the appearance of obedience to some external procedure of inquiry. I find I cannot bear to be present with, attend to, or imaginatively participate in anything more than a little. I cannot bear to be alone with anything (myself or any aspect of my world) for more than a few moments. My self/world conversation is often bleak and empty. We do not have much interest in each other. In no time at all I am flicking away to somewhere else. Everything distracts. It is not that something else gets any more attention, but by fluttering on I can avoid being where I am embarrassed, empty, at a loss, bored, threatened. We are in a fast-food, fast-turnover world. Quick profit is what is most attractive. Anything that is slow, time consuming, undramatic, uneventful, ordinary, is to be avoided. It is unprofitable. Conversational Inquiry involves performance of the arts of attention, ‘indwelling’, ‘breaking out’, telling and listening. It moves between close attention to particulars and a wider attentiveness to context and circumstances. It is a discipline of discourse which involves giving accounts, telling our stories and being concerned with how we compose our narratives as well as our experience.

Concluding comments I have tried here to encourage recognition of why we should care for language and speaking of many kinds. This perspective on inquiry arises from, and extends beyond, the clinical practice of the psychotherapist. It is not ‘applied’ to therapy from somewhere outside. It may not prove to be of practical significance for you, but I hope it will help me at least to develop a more questioning approach to what is going on in therapy, in many other aspects of clinical practice and in life more generally. My attempt has been to create a potentially useful fiction, a place of fruitful habitation between and amongst our private and public selves.

Note 1 Paper presented at British Psychological Society Division of Clinical Psychology Research Interest Group conference on qualitative research, Cambridge, 7–9 July, 1986. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CHAPTER 6

PSYCHOLOGISTS ARE HUMAN TOO1

When I hear people accuse psychologists of being isolated from the real world, small minded, hidebound by doctrine and method, incapable of learning from experience, I have to laugh. After all, I know, personally, half a dozen (well at least three) psychologists who, after only a few years of dedicated experimentation in their discipline, and despite very expensive and lengthy training to the contrary, have been forced to change some of their fundamental professional beliefs and accept that the subjects they have been herding through their laboratories are human after all. Not that mere personal experience is enough in such matters and thankfully they have had moderate support from the literature to sustain their struggling, new-born beliefs. Recent papers attesting to the same view have appeared under such titles as ‘The human subject in psychological research’ (Schultz 1969) and ‘The human person in modern psychological science’ (Rychlak 1970). This would be enough of a change to digest, but further murmurings of unrest have been heard recently in the psychological world. Both arguments and evidence have been presented in recent years to leave little doubt that almost all methods of psychological enquiry – interviewing, testing, experimentation – are forms of human relationships. If even half the results reported by Rosenthal (1966) are confirmed, there is enough to suggest that certain characteristics and expectations of experimenters interact with characteristics and expectations of subjects in ways which can significantly and systematically affect the outcome of experiments. When the work of Friedman (1967), Orne (1962), Milgram (1965) and others is also considered, there seems little reason for rejecting the central fact that psychological experiments are social events not ‘pure’ situations in which a detached scientist observes subject-beings who react only to the things prescribed or noticed by the experimenter.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Those who are not steeped in the ideals and traditions of psychology may consider it evidence in support of their views of the pettiness of much psychology that these two considerations – that subjects are human and that psychological investigations involve social relationships – should only now be recognized as possibly affecting experimental psychology. They may also find it difficult to understand why these two ‘discoveries’ should cause any alarm or uneasiness among scientific psychologists. Though one might readily sympathize with this outsider’s view, I think they would be very wrong in supposing that no fundamental issues are involved. Indeed I want to suggest that it is some awareness of the basic reorientations involved in recognizing these two features as part of scientific psychology which accounts for their general neglect and any present uneasiness now they are being forced more directly on the psychologist’s attention. 52 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

The psychologist’s dilemma Many psychologists are dissatisfied with the fragmented and limited nature of their discipline in face of the rich subtle diversity of their subject matter – man. Many also feel that the present limitations of psychology are merely the inevitable hallmarks of a young science and, if we continue as we have done, we will, in time, increase the effective relevance of our findings. While I readily agree with this in part, it may also be that alteration of some basic assumptions in psychology will open up some paths for exploration which the recipe ‘more of the same’ may not do. It is this alternative which I wish to follow here in an attempt to undo some of the straps on the straight jacket of traditional scientific methodology within which psychologists have long struggled. Why then might psychologists find it hard to accept the humanity of their subjects within the experimental situation and why might some find it disturbing to acknowledge that the results of most forms of psychological enquiry are determined in part by the sort of relationship existing between scientist and subject? To understand the psychologist’s dilemma here a little consideration needs to be given to what might be meant by subjects being human and experiments involving relationships. Now, of course, psychologists have never been any less likely to regard other people as human than anyone else when they have been dealing with them in their everyday lives. It is only when they adopt their professional roles and place people in their experiments as subjects that they temporarily act as if these people, within that context, were less than human – in fact subjects, ready to do their master’s will. In suggesting that we as psychologists now need to recognize more often the humanity of subjects what is implied is that we come to regard people who take part in our experiments as human beings just like us, the experimenters, even while they are helping us with our research. This really can be alarming because it means accepting that subjects, like experimenters, can and do continuously think, theorize, anticipate, experiment, react, create, rebel and comply just like everyone else – and what is more, they can and often do all these things in any experiment the psychologist designs. Since there are virtually no theories which can adequately account for this sort of behaviour in subjects or experimental designs which begin to offer us means of controlling and partialling out these many activities, this recognition of humanity is professionally disquieting. These problems multiply when we consider the question of relationships and their possible effects on results. The problems here, as with so many in psychology, can be traced back to the fact that modern scientific psychology is based essentially on a ‘physical science’ model, on the pattern found so successful by those involved in the natural sciences at the end of the last century. In these ‘hard’ sciences, experimenters were dealing with things. It mattered not a jot if the experimenter smiled, shouted, sang or danced a jig as he poured acid A into acid B or mixed a quantity of element

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 X with compound Y. He could do any of these things in the experimental situation in the happy knowledge that the actions or properties of the acids, elements and com- pounds would be quite unaffected. Clearly then the experimenter did not have to be conceptualized as an integral part of each experiment. His personal characteristics did not have to be recognized as variable modifiers of the action of the elements or acids on each other. Psychologists adopted the same position and viewed experimenters as quite interchangeable ‘Es’, assuming that as long as you had one it didn’t really matter who or what he was, provided he adhered to a loosely defined policy of pseudoself- effacement. Each E was then required to adapt his own person to the roles of all- knowingness and anonymity at the same time. Recent research on the social nature of psychological research casts all these practices into doubt. Now we find, whether we like it or not, that experimenters are after all, all different, because they are different people and they form different relationships Psychologists are human too 53

with each of their subjects whether they intend it or not. While it must be the case that this matters more for some kinds of experiments than others, it does seem likely that the more the focus is on probing factors felt to be of some significance to each subject’s view of life, the more his relationship with the experimenter and the whole experimental situation will affect how he responds. If we, then, consider confrontations between experimenters and subjects in order to try to specify what sorts of relationship they generally involve we may note some interesting things which could be disquieting if we took them seriously. We note that, as a rule, the experimenter makes use of people to help him answer questions which he, not they, raise; more frequently than ever (Seeman 1969) he makes use of some form of deception, misinforming subjects about what they are doing or about what this indicates about themselves; often he takes little care, or exercises little responsibility, concerning the effects which stressful experimental tasks or conditions have on subjects, other than as regards his interest in the experiment, in short or long term; seldom does he give subjects much opportunity to express their concerns or ideas relating to the experimental experience; seldom does he engage in repeated encounters with subjects, mostly preferring single or few meetings with naïve subjects. While I am intentionally painting a rather lurid picture, there are perhaps enough grains of truth in it to be recognizable. This present tendency to set up psychological experiments in which the experimenter quickly ‘grabs’ some data from subjects and then makes off with them with relatively little concern with the subjects he leaves strewn in the path behind him seems to rest on the fairly pervasive belief in science generally (though it is now more often being challenged) that the scientist has no direct social responsibility concerning his scientific commitments. This position can be questioned in all sciences, but surely most of all in psychology where the subject matter is people. When we try to unearth their secrets and use them to predict and control behaviour we are engaging directly in social manipulations for which we are surely obliged to take full responsibility. Otherwise, in many areas of investigation, we may end up only with the sorts of information which people who distrust and deceive us are prepared to provide (see Kelman 1967; Stricker 1967; Stricker et al. 1969). So experiments seem to involve relationships and the sorts of relationships implied by common experimental practices are sometimes rather unsavoury. This presents real problems for the psychologist who wishes to respect his subjects’ humanity. He may feel obliged to try to change features of the relationships traditionally established and avoid deception, give more to his subjects for their help, take more responsibility for their reactions and welfare, make more long-term engagements with them so that they and he have more opportunity to ensure that the ‘results’ obtained are in some way meaningful. Each of these possibilities creates severe problems for psychology, but none so great as the central problem inherent in acknowledging that experiments

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 involve relationships; namely, that we do not know how differences in relationships have influenced the kinds of facts we have already collected or continue to affect those now being gathered. Our first response is likely to be to seek ways of ruling out or controlling for this ‘source of error’. This will certainly be necessary, useful and even possible in some circumstances, but is it enough, and is it wise to treat this ever present phenomenon as an enemy to be defeated whenever possible rather than an ally to be recognized and used? The dilemma for psychologists is then two sided: if we accept that our subjects are human, just like us, do we have to do the impossible and become super-human in order to study them as scientists, trying to predict and control their theorizing, questioning, experimenting and all the rest? If we accept or find that experimental results are often determined in part by the sorts of relationships existing between experimenter and subject surely we have to abandon all claims to objectivity and detachment as investigators 54 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

and even the possibility of ensuring replicable results in some areas of enquiry. Have we not then to abandon claims to being or becoming a science at all? My own answer to both of these questions is a firm ‘NO’. What follows is an attempt to give some grounds for this belief.

Subjects as scientists The Psychology of Personal Constructs outlined by George Kelly in 1955 seems helpful here. Kelly’s theory is liberating in a way that no other psychological theory seems to be because his is an elaborated theory about the ‘theorizing’ and ‘experimenting’ of ordinary people. He suggests that everyone makes sense of the world in terms of personally learned interpretations, or personal constructs. For each person these personal dimensions for discriminating between events and anticipating new events are organized to form different, more or less coordinated systems – their personal construct systems. No two systems are then exactly alike (though there are similarities because we inhabit similar external and internal worlds) and no two constructs refer to exactly the same discriminations (though again there are greater or lesser similarities between people, depending partly on which subsystem the constructs belong to). While Kelly assumes there is a real world around us, he assumes that we never at any time in our lives come into direct, naked contact with it. All our contact with reality, he suggests, is by means of our interpretations, our constructions. He suggests that it may be advantageous not to view man only in terms of certain common problems, experiences or drives, but to look at men in their efforts at trying to make sense of themselves and their worlds; to look at their personal ways of giving meaning to events and their constant engagements in the world in testing out, modifying, defining or elaborating their ways of experiencing the world. Kelly turns the tables on psychologists by suggesting that it may be profitable for us to look at people in the ways in which they are somewhat like scientists; to look at them as if we were of the same breed and not some different species. So he here directly faces us with the inevitability of psychologists using their own personal construct systems to make sense of the sense-making systems and actions of others. The psychologist, like everyone else, can only give meaning to events within the limits of his own system and when he studies other people it is likely to be they who are the informed experts on their own personal construct systems, not himself. So right away this view of man in relation to the psychologist who studies him looks unusual and challenging. Here in one blow the subject, patient or anyone else is seen as sharing some of the essential skills and limitations of those who call themselves scientists. Furthermore, Kelly specifically designed his theory to have central relevance to the problems of interpersonal interactions. In this connection one of his most useful

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 concepts is that of role which he redefined in relation to the main features of construct theory, making it a distinctly psychological, rather than a social or economic notion. He described it thus – ‘In terms of the theory of personal constructs, a role is a psychological process based upon the role player’s construction of aspects of the construction systems of those with whom he attempts to join in a social enterprise. In less precise but more familiar language, a role is an ongoing pattern of behaviour that follows from a person’s understanding of how others who are associated with him in his task think. In idiomatic language, a role is a position that one can play on a certain team without even waiting for the signals’ (Kelly 1955). A role in Kelly’s system, then, is based on the sense you make of the sense being made explicitly or implicitly by others with whom you are engaged. This concept clearly provides a useful context within which problematic notions like deception, lying, social desir- ability and other biasing of responses can be given psychological rather than moralistic Psychologists are human too 55

interpretations. According to how one person construes another, he will modulate his own thinking and action in relation to that other person. Here we are back with something very relevant to the second part of the psychologist’s dilemma. For the sake of what follows, two other features of Kelly’s theoretical position will be mentioned. Unlike many other theorists, Kelly insists that man be viewed as an essentially active creature. By being alive he is in constant motion and even to stay in some respects the same in a changing world he has to keep on moving. Of course he is not all moving all the time in just the same way. Some aspects of his construct system are seen as changing more obviously and quickly than others, but we are encouraged right from the beginning to change our minds about the inevitability of finding good solid stabilities in man’s personality; change, Kelly suggests, is of the essence and stabilities may better be viewed as regularities of movement or methods of controlling movement than as static traits. Kelly also clearly recognizes that many of our constructions of events are outside consciousness. Many of our most important ways of dealing with events, he suggests, are by means of constructs which are non-verbal constructs, acted out rather than specified by language. Many of these non-verbal constructs may have been acquired in infancy before language was developed and have since remained outside our awareness. Constructs are therefore recognized as being at different levels of awareness, some being clearly articulated and tied to words while others are more vaguely appreciated, being manifest in action and feeling only. Many aspects of construct theory seem very like common sense, but it would be unwise to suppose that the theory is no more than this. Kelly has, I think, provided a ‘new look’ for psychology which could transform not only how we view those we study but also our ideas about experimenters and about the nature of the discipline psychology may become. A fruitful science of man may begin to look very unlike what we presently recognize if some of Kelly’s fundamental ideas can be worked out in practice. And this is where difficulties begin to arise; can they be worked out in practice or has he left us with a heightened desire for a more human perspective on our subject matter without the means of doing much about it? Many psychologists with very un- Kellian theoretical positions will readily admit that much of what Kelly says makes a great deal of sense. But in a practical world, seeming sensible, even exciting, is no substitute for being useful.

A methodological theory without adequate methods At first glance these doubts seem unfounded. Kelly has, after all, provided novel and exciting methods for studying the nature and functions of personal constructs. Perhaps more than any other personality theorist he has enriched our stock of tools for psycho-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 logical enquiry. The Role Construct Repertory Test and the better known extension of this, the Repertory Grid (Kelly 1955; Bannister and Mair 1968) are both means of elicit- ing from individuals some of the personal constructs they use to structure their worlds. Something of the sorts of things they are concerned to make sense of and how they order the sense they make – the personal meanings they erect and use – can be grasped and systematized within these methods. The Self Characterization Sketch (Kelly 1955) is an additional, simple yet subtle, means of obtaining from any individual something of his constructions about how he views himself, his strengths and weaknesses, methods and missions. These sketches were often used by Kelly as the first stage in designing new role sketches for patients to use in the course of Fixed Role Therapy. This form of treatment can also be viewed as a tool of enquiry whereby the patient in adopting a new, temporary view of himself (defined in terms of a role sketch which he will try to act out in life) may find new perspectives 56 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

on the world and new modes of enquiry and action coming within his grasp because he is approaching the world differently. Surely these are innovations enough? Well, for our present purposes I think not. Over the course of some years of making some use of most of these methods I have repeatedly been forced to recognize that Kelly, while enormously extending the sorts of subtle things about people we can systematically study, still left us in the dilemma outlined earlier. He himself was not so trapped, I am sure, but he has not provided the necessary means for others to transcend the usual subject/scientist roles and make full use of the scientist-like qualities of man which his theory encourages us to explore. The Role Construct Repertory Test, the Repertory Grid and the Self Characteriza- tion Method all give freedom to the person studied to express something of his own personal achievements and concerns as regards sense-making. They all allow him to make use of and express some of his personal means for structuring events and anticipating the future. None, however, takes much note of the fact that the poor experimenter, therapist or tester has to make some sense of what has been presented to him. Remembering that Kelly suggests that we all make sense of things by means of interpretative constructs, surely an adequate methodology for a science of personal constructs would have to take intimate account of how the psychologist is to interpret the interpretations of others. Within Kelly’s theory there is just no escape from your own construct system. Yet, as in virtually all psychology to date, psychologists doing work with grid methods or in relation to construct theory make pronouncements about their subjects on the basis of their test results just as though we should accept the sense they make as the inevitable end points in their enquiries rather than any statements made by those they have studied. Surely the sense they make is their achievement or failure and their sense-making equipment would have to be understood to know what conclusions we should draw from it; and of course, we, in drawing our conclusions are aware, not of naked truth, but only of those things which our own systems allow us to entertain. Remember Kelly suggests that no construct dimensions used by different people are quite the same and no two construct systems have been put together with quite the same pattern or logic. So the possibilities of one person misunderstanding the concerns or intentions of another are likely to be quite great even where no active deception is practised. How we jump the gap of personal knowledge would seem to be something deserving study and requiring incorporation into the methodology of a discipline based on the use of personal constructs. Kelly was well aware of the central importance of his idea of role to his theory and methods. His theory focuses on interpersonal role construing and his methods all make reference to the term role in their titles. Yet it seems to have been only in Fixed Role and other forms of therapy that he approached an adequate use of his own novel definition of role as a course of activity carried out in the light of your understanding

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 of another. So this central construct in Kelly’s theory which indicates how a man can enter into meaningful social interaction and understanding with others is only frac- tionally developed within the formal methods suggested by him. Even in Fixed Role Therapy little formal account is taken of the fact that in any interaction both or all participants are engaging in a series of developing role relationships of various kinds. Attention is focused most directly on the means whereby one individual – the patient – can make use of a new role sketch and by trying to adopt it begin to understand himself and others in a new light. As we have noted, Kelly stresses that ‘man is a form of motion’, but we find that movement is only awkwardly incorporated in the methods he outlined. Only by testing and retesting with grid measures (as in most traditional methods of measurement in psychology) can some idea of movement be gained. Hinkle (1965), in his discussion of Resistance to Change and Implication grids introduced a more direct concern with Psychologists are human too 57

change, but still he only dealt with some aspects of change thought possible by the subject. The processes and paths whereby a person in fact changes are still not tapped. In Fixed Role Therapy, as in any therapy, change is of course central, but Kelly functioning as a clinician does not provide an explicit framework within which personal and interpersonal changes can be systematically noted and explored. Finally, although Kelly stressed in his therapeutic work the importance of pre-verbal (acted out rather than conceptualized) constructs and other constructs (whether sub- merged or suspended) which were outside the person’s normal levels of awareness, these constructions find relatively little place in his more formalized methods of enquiry. Certainly it is possible to guess and to enquire into what is being denied by a person on the basis of what he is affirming (through the idea of contrast implicit in any construction); certainly in a Repertory Grid it is possible and not unusual for a person to reveal relationships between constructs of which he was previously unaware; certainly it is possible in some Implication Grids to note second and third order implications of which the person himself is in ignorance; and additionally in Self Characterization Sketches it may be possible to get some ideas about some of the enterprises a person may be engaged in without full awareness. But all of these only touch the edge of the vital range of centrally important constructions which are acted rather than stated, felt rather than thought. While Kelly himself found great scope for detailed study of these constructions in his therapeutic work (as evidenced by many parts of Volume 2 of The Psychology of Personal Constructs) and in his dealings with students in research and teaching, they eluded any adequate inclusion in his formal methods of enquiry. The psychology of personal constructs can be considered a methodological theory. It does not preempt any particular problems or characteristics as being of fundamental and universal importance to all men but rather focuses on how people give meaning to their lives, act on and test the sense they make. It is a framework within which to explore how people ‘theorize’ and ‘experiment’ in their own continuing concerns with pinning down their lives or broadening their horizons. This makes it a unique theory in psychology and of importance because it raises the whole enterprise onto a higher level of abstraction (not vagueness) thus enhancing its generality (because it gives freedom to explore and fill in the contents and structure of each person’s life within the framework provided) and its potential usefulness. The word ‘potential’ has to be insisted on here because, to date, the theory has excited many people but left most baffled as to how to make real use of it. Although this is potentially a revolutionary theory, most research using its ideas or the methods associated with them still looks remarkably like much traditional research in many respects. The experimenter still tends to remain outside most studies in grand omnipotence and isolation. True he more often affirms his common humanity with his subjects in the opening paragraphs of his research reports, but somehow he manages, none the less,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 to remain in the end aloof from the common herd. So, with Kelly’s theoretical contribution, the psychologist’s dilemma seems theoretically soluble, but generally in practice it remains stubbornly unresolved.

Bringing the experimenter in from the cold Without doubt, concern with bringing experimenters in from the cold is hotting up. Schultz (1969) observes that because of a changed view of the capacities and functions of the scientist, there has been a ‘closing of the gap between the observer and the observed, and the change of focus of scientific enquiry from an independent and objectively knowable universe to man’s observation of the universe. No longer the detached observer, the modern scientist is now cast in the role of participant-observer. The process of observation becomes an interaction, with both sides contributing to 58 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

the observational transaction.’ He argues further that a ‘change in experimental technique is called for on empirical, ethical, as well as philosophical grounds’. What sort of change this is to be remains the crucial question. The fascinating work by Rosenthal (1966) is clearly one approach to the study of experimenters which merits much attention, but from the point of view being discussed here this is still essentially a slightly modified use of traditional methods where the real experimenter takes one step backwards and studies as his subjects both experimenters and subjects. Other approaches have been indicated by Kelman (1967) focusing on various forms of Role playing exercises. These also seem in varying ways promising in that they may reduce active deception and perhaps allow more co-operation rather than competition or conflict between experimenters and subjects. However for present purposes, they still leave the experimenter on the side-lines to some extent, though of course he may participate in some experiments in various subject-roles. Even then, the end would be to gain co-operation and reduce distrust so that this and other experiments can continue to draw on a willing group of subjects; the experimenter is not here woven into the fabric of the experiment in much more than a make-believe manner. Also of considerable interest is the approach to this problem being investigated by Jourard (1968) and his students. They seem concerned with factors which affect ‘dis- closures’ between subjects and experimenters and the effects of mutual disclosure on people’s readiness to open themselves further to study and understanding. His concern with ‘dialogue’ between subjects and experimenters and the ‘dyadic’ effect (‘disclosure begets disclosure’) resulting from dialogue provides a more integral involvement of experimenters in experiments. Without intending my comments as criticisms, I am personally unhappy with the passivity of the language Jourard uses to describe interactions; using terms like ‘disclose’, ‘uncover’, ‘reveal’ and ‘unveil’. His belief here seems to be that in mutual, trusting relationships the real person is ‘revealed’, while it may be that to a considerable extent people are created and developed in relationships and not just uncovered. But more important in the present context, Jourard’s immediate concerns seem to be in exploring the benefits to be gained once people are prepared to reveal more about themselves. This is certainly of great interest but in exploring the strategies and tactics people employ in developing relationships of different kinds it will be important to be able to study the ways people create and use fictions, keep and reveal secrets for personal and interpersonal reasons, not just to know what happens at some point late in the process when trust has been achieved.

The cycle of enquiry My own suggestions for a general model for psychological enquiry which may come a little nearer to solving the psychologist’s dilemma noted earlier have been outlined else-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 where (Mair, 1970a). At this stage it must be regarded as essentially speculative. What follows may be more intelligible if read subsequent to that other account. Here I want only to present a very brief outline of some of the main features of the approach and will concentrate more on specifying some of the reasons why various aspects of the methods so far conceived in relation to the model seem important and necessary. Experiments involve relationships and relationships generally involve some form of interaction. One of our commonest forms of interactions which we use to build and develop relationships is the conversation. What I’m suggesting is using a model for enquiry patterned on some of the important features of the sorts of activities which constitute conversations; what leads up to them and what results from them. I am not suggesting a directly literal use of the term and finding out about people just by chat- ting to them. Making the assumption, like Kelly, that people are always actively going about the business of living their lives, I’m supposing they actively theorize, speculate, Psychologists are human too 59

experiment and explore on their own account; they don’t just do these and other things when ‘pushed’ by other people. But before pursuing this further some orienting comments concerning the possible relationship between this approach and current methods of investigation and legitimate topics of concern in psychology may be useful. In psychology most studies involve the experimenter in putting a subject in a specified situation and observing what he does, or doing things to a person within some prescribed context and recording how he responds; or getting him to do certain specified things and seeing what happens to him as a result. There is generally little or no concern with incorporating as part of the study the ways in which the experimenter makes something of what he thinks the subject is doing or how the experimenter goes about adjusting or making up his next moves on the basis of what he thought happened in the initial phase of the encounter. Neither is much attention paid to what the subject makes of what the experimenter thought he did to him, nor of the use to which he puts the sense he makes nor of how he may then variously act or experiment on his own account to see what he can make of what he thinks the experimenter suggested or to see how the experimenter will respond if he does one thing rather than another. Again, most experiments only exist within the prescribed laboratory situation and what happens beyond these bounds is presumed generally to be irrelevant. But accepting that people may by now often have developed quite special ways of responding in any situations they view as psychological experiments (e.g. Orne 1962; Milgram 1965) it may be particularly important to try to change some of their characteristics and broaden their relevance to normal living. What I am suggesting may direct attention to aspects of the process of interaction or the cycle of enquiry which have received relatively little attention. This in no way detracts from the necessity and importance of work on observation, manipulation and control which at present occupies such a central position in much of psychology. If anything, I hope that some attention to the other aspects of the process of enquiry may allow us to develop further skills in these presently popular parts of the process and open up new possibilities of understanding people which exclusive focus on these aspects alone would not readily allow. As psychologists it would seem important, if we wish to understand and use more about the whole process of interaction, not only to be able make predictions about others but to explore how people in general make use of anticipations in their normal lives; not only to be able to carry out experiments on others to see what results we get, but to appreciate that everyone can be seen as an active agent and to explore the diverse ways they and we as people, all the time, are constructing and executing ‘experiments’ to confirm old answers or raise new questions. Not only do psychologists need to be able to define the criteria they use in accepting new evidence as proof,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 but we could also be concerned to specify the diverse ways in which we and others, as people, set up and use (mostly implicitly) criteria to allow us to convert personally appreciated possibilities into usable beliefs; not only do we as psychologists need to be able to create and use theories to organize our actions, but we have to be able to examine how we and others as people create and organize our ideas and the range of uses to which ideas of different kinds can be put; not only do we professionally need to be able to modify our theories in the light of new evidence and create new ideas and frames of reference for future action, we also need to recognize how people generally also have to abandon present beliefs and develop means of ‘riding with the punch’ in creating new possibilities for thought and action to meet changing circumstances; not only do we as psychologists have to recognize that people often don’t know at all fully what they think, feel or do, we need also to recognize that we, like everyone else, are in the same boat and that our control over ourselves and our subject matter might well be 60 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

extended by the introduction of methods whereby our personal limitations of awareness could be partly overcome and we thus extended. Everything the psychologist does as a scientist is part of his capacities and skills as a human being and is therefore by definition part of the subject matter which, as a psychologist, he claims to study. While psychologists as scientists no doubt have a lot to teach themselves and others as people, psychologists as people have a lot more to teach themselves and others who study people, because they are and will always be the subject matter which by their discipline they seek to understand a little further.

A conversational model for psychological enquiry In using the term ‘conversational model’, I wish to define a contrast to the more usual ‘physical science’ or ‘observational’ model on which much of psychology has been based. In some ways the term ‘role’ model would have been as appropriate (using ‘role’ in something like Kelly’s sense) but this was avoided because ‘role’ means so many different technical things to different people, because I wanted to stay close to common language and because I did not want the model to be tied only to Kellian theory. The term ‘conversational cycle’ or ‘experiential cycle’ model might have been more adequate, if a bit clumsy, because what I am concerned with is the complete cycle of how we create, test and modify our experience of the world, especially our interpersonal world. Though accepting the term ‘conversational’ model at present to refer to this cycle of events, the term may also be slightly misleading because I am certainly not interested only in what people say to each other, but also with what the other person is not saying or ‘saying’ by his actions and what each thinks and does as a result of what they have made of everything gathered from their encounters and how they again go about changing themselves in anticipation of and as a result of further encounters. Consider a practical situation. Mr. Rogers and Mr. Skinner sit down together to undertake an exploratory study of how they each and together ‘theorize’ and ‘experiment’ about themselves, each other and others in general. Mr. Skinner writes two brief character sketches of Mr. Rogers (following, perhaps, similar instructions to those used by Kelly for Self Characterizations). One of these sketches is written only for himself; a completely private view of Mr. Rogers which no one else will see. The other sketch is written specifically for Mr. Rogers to read. This latter one is couched in terms and touches on topics which Mr. Skinner will feel quite comfortable about telling Mr. Rogers, he is not required to ‘bare his soul’ or ‘tell all’, but just to give a picture of his view of Mr. Rogers which he will feel quite able to take (one participant must not traumatize the other or others since each needs everyone else to stay around so that the enquiry can continue). Mr. Rogers also writes two equivalent sketches about Mr. Skinner, one private one for Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 his own eyes only and the other a more public one specifically for Mr. Skinner to read. Messrs. Skinner and Rogers now pass to the other their ‘public’ sketches. They read them, then systematically take turns at questioning the other to clarify points in the sketch they received which they understood little or not at all. They then take time to note down their initial reactions to the new information which has been given them about themselves; what they feel, think, want to do, say, reject, accept, avoid or welcome about it. Next, in turn, each questions the other in detail about what evidence he has for each of the statements he has made about the other; about his grounds for believing the things he does and for saying the things he has; about the criteria he may be functioning in terms of, in accepting the evidence he has done and about the criteria and evidence he would use if he were to become more certain yet of the validity of the statements he has Psychologists are human too 61

made. In addition, at this stage, they may then examine the description of themselves presented to them by the other and analyse it in terms of what it seems to suggest about the interests, ideas, strengths, limitations, tactics and such like of the person who wrote it. Each will then also take turns in questioning the other concerning the evidence which justifies the conclusions he has reached regarding the characteristics and concerns of the writer. (Here, as at any other point in the entire investigation, each may write both public and private versions of conclusions reached, the evidence he has used, the assessments he has made, and so forth). At this point the first face to face encounter might end and each withdraw to continue their normal lives, arranging to meet again in an hour, day, week or month (whatever their purpose in the enquiry) to continue the face to face part of the study. As they go, however, the study goes with them. In the encounter just completed many personal issues will have been touched on and stirred; each participant (and there could easily be more than two) may find, whether he wishes it or not, that he continues to ruminate on, act out, experiment with, attempt to disconfirm or confirm in a variety of imaginary or practical ways some of the issues and possibilities raised. Each participant must be vigilant to note down at any time how he goes about dealing with these matters (and this is likely to require considerable training in sensitive, detached self-awareness). The cycle of encounter and withdrawal for personal exploration can be repeated indefinitely or terminated at any agreed stage, depending on the main point of the study or the concerns of those involved.

Why? Why participate in such a procedure? Why is it structured in this form? Some possible answers to these questions can now be considered.

Why invite ‘private’ and ‘public’ statements? Although some people, sometimes, in relation to some topics will not wish or need to present a different assessment to others from the one they entertain privately, this aspect of the design is very important. It is a direct affirmation that it is acceptable, expected, humanly necessary, frequently personally or socially laudable and always of some use to think more than you say or to modulate the expression of your beliefs according to the context within which you are placed. Instead of constantly urging people to a spuri- ous ideal of ‘pseudohonesty’, participants are here encouraged to recognize and take for granted that on both or all sides of any interaction other people and they themselves have a right to privacy and quite legitimately use and need to use ‘fictions’. What is here prized more highly than ‘instant honesty’ is the development of skill in recognizing and Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 expressing for your own use, and for scientific purposes, the diverse ways in which ideas can be held for use within oneself rather than jettisoned carelessly in the outside world. It is here that study of the nature and purposes of secrets (Bakan 1967) finds a proper and useful place in general psychology. Now perhaps people will not believe you when you say the ‘private’ sketch is really private. This is however a matter of increasing trust between participants and is exactly the kind of issue which can readily be seen not as a limitation or problem but used as a topic for investigation. As the cycles of encounter and exploration continue people’s views of the situation and the relationships involved will change. The manner and pattern of these changes would be the subject of enquiry. Further, it does not really matter if a person keeps out of his ‘private’ sketch some of the concerns of which he is fully or only partially aware. Sometimes we cannot afford to admit what we suspect 62 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

we feel, at least at some times and in some contexts. By recognizing the necessity of privacy and by encouraging people to record, even partially, their private views, they may more readily develop their awareness of what is unsaid, not fully conceptualized but real none the less. Hopefully, these ‘private’ and ‘public’ versions may serve other purposes. Their use seems directly relevant to Kelly’s concept of role. As we all know, we are prepared and able to say different sorts of things to different people depending on what we think of them and what we want them to think of us. This is really what Kelly’s idea of role is about. But full understanding of the explicit line of action a person follows in relation to another often cannot be gained from examining his expressed words or deeds in relation to that other person. The posture one person takes up towards another may be more readily clarified (even for the person himself) when he compares what he would say and what he would not say to the other person. By examining the similarities and differences between one’s private and public views of a person one may be able more surely to define his assumptions about that other person in relation to himself. He may then be in a better position to choose to adjust or maintain that stance once it has been spelled out so clearly. The participants in so examining the differences between their public and private versions and systematically questioning themselves as to ‘why?’ each difference and similarity exists for them (in a ‘laddering’ process like that for elic- iting superordinate constructs outlined by Hinkle (see Mair 1969; Wright 1969, 1970) are likely also to extend their awareness and skills in conceptualizing the sorts of needs or concerns they have regarding self-maintenance or self-development in many of their relationships with others. Of course, what is kept private and what is made public will change in a variety of ways as different relationships progress. Throughout the course of any investigation of this sort repeated comparisons would be made by each participant between public and private statements (though what these statements were about would differ according to the purpose of the study) made at any particular time and between private or public versions used at different stages. The analyses of the latter might indicate something of the changing nature of the role relationships involved. But surely it is ridiculous in something calling itself research, or even science, to encourage people to produce and use material which they may never divulge to the other participants? Certainly this seems a bit unusual, but the problems may be more apparent than real. If a person is unwilling to communicate the concrete details of any secrets this may matter little since, after all, virtually no secret in itself is likely to be very surprising and any specific kind of secret is likely to mean different things for different people. What may be of more importance in understanding a person are the implications of particular secrets for him; what functions they serve in his personal and interpersonal affairs. These functions may sometimes be more easily admitted than

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 specific secrets and they may be explored in comparisons between public and private views. Even if they, initially, are not made available to the other participants, remember the investigator is an involved participant and will be developing his own insights into such issues. He can choose to communicate his discoveries whenever he wishes. Furthermore, we are here dealing with the study of developing relationships, continuing interactions, and what seems ‘unmentionable’ at one stage is likely to seem like mundane ‘past history’ at a later date and easily divulged. This approach to psychological investigation is not intended as an exercise in psychic ‘strip tease’ or ‘self revelation’ or ‘confession’. It is rather a mode of enquiry into the processes of interaction, enquiry and change which aims to make use of and develop all a person’s psychological skills. Each participant also has the opportunity to extend his understanding, conceptualizations and means of finding out about himself, others and relationships between them. Psychologists are human too 63

Why write formal sketches? This whole set of engagements is intended as a disciplined research enquiry, not a casual chat or a mini-encounter group. Because of this it seemed important to have opportunities at repeated encounters to record considered, organized ideas about the present position reached by each person regarding the topic of the enquiry. Without such firm, considered statements it would be difficult to trace the processes of change involved since each person would readily lose sight of his earlier positions. These ‘set pieces’ may fulfil a number of purposes. They may provide each person with a means of expressing his present position regarding himself or others in relation to the topic under investigation; they provide a way of conveying convincing, genuine, personally relevant information to the other person or persons involved; they give an opportunity for each to develop his skill in specifying characteristics of himself or others. In the terms used by Fingarette (1969) in his penetrating analysis of self-deception, they may provide an opportunity for each to develop the ‘skill of spelling out his engagements in the world’. In this procedure each is not only describing aspects of himself or others, but given the opportunity to discover and create further possible ways of adequately capturing in words the sense he can make of psychological issues. More formal analyses of these character sketches using Kelly’s method of analyzing Self Characterizations or Murray’s system of need analysis or psychoanalytic ideas or any other, could also be used if required. But in the first instance the participants’ own means of analyzing and conceptualizing the information may be of particular importance.

Why make inferences about the writer of the sketches? There is still sometimes in psychology a tendency to think that when a description of someone is made it can in some sense be quite ‘objective’, implying that personal limitations have somehow been by-passed in reaching conclusions. I do not see such a view as generally realistic. Consequently in this part of the procedure of enquiry it may be possible to find out about the varying ways and degrees to which people formulate their descriptions or judgements of others in terms which can be viewed as ‘projections’ of themselves. In addition, it seems important to seek some rules concerning how people’s evaluations of the ‘information’ they gain from others may be modified by what they gather about the characteristics or concerns of the ‘informant’. Our evaluation of any evidence is, after all, affected by the source of that information. The concern here is to pay some direct attention to this feature of interaction which is sometimes overlooked.

Why inform the other participant(s) of your assessments of them?

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Ever since psychologists began assessing others they have been, by one means or another, reaching conclusions about their subjects and quietly carrying these assessments away to reveal, not to the person assessed, but to colleagues or others. Thus, the one person who is probably the greatest expert on the sense or nonsense of the psychologist’s assessment has virtually always been excluded from the validational issue: after all, he would be subjective and involved and anyway, he is not really competent to judge the worth of technical assessments by expensively trained professionals! My concern here is to reverse this trend. This immediately raises the question of ‘contaminating’ the subject of our assessment because he might now change in some ways. Exactly, that’s what might well happen and it would be of considerable interest to see it happen. Surely an essential feature of life is that we continually learn from experience, well or badly. This section of the procedure is seen as a kind of intensification of the normal ways of finding out more about oneself and others. Concern here is not so much with the rightness 64 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

or wrongness of the participants’ assessments of each other but with the ways in which each makes use of his own and the other assessments. People are bound to change in some ways and remain the same in others. The present model may provide a framework within which some of these options can be noted by those involved. It may appear that the use of this model supposes that man is all cognition and nothing much else. This is definitely not so. Indeed, the approach was accepted partly because it might allow many possibilities for noting and incorporating observations of behaviour as well as words. It is cognitive in the sense that all science is and in the way anything which concerns making explicit what was confused, complex and implicit is bound to be. It should not be assumed that because the aim is to ‘spell out’ psychological processes of many kinds what is ‘spelled out’ is limited to intellectual matters. Fingarette (1969) notes that by observing discrepancies between what a person says and what he appears to do, clues can be obtained about the projects in which he is engaged without awareness, such discrepancies may reveal how some of his purposes may not even be open to his own inspection. Because in the conversational approach under consideration, each participant is actively encouraged to use all his ideas, feelings, intuitions and observations about himself and the other participant(s), he is bound to incorporate these in his assessments or use them as evidence in justifying the conclusions he may reach at any point. Thus, although what is written down is necessarily verbal, what contributes to these written assessments will certainly not be limited in this way.

Why study short and longer term consequences of encounters? Psychological experiments in general tend to be short term encounters. Even longitu- dinal studies are generally only cross-sections sliced out at different times. There has thus been remarkably little work on the processes whereby people go about being the same or becoming different. Partly this has been because psychologists have generally wanted to keep their subject matter ‘pure’ and ‘naïve’. But people are not like that and if we want to conceptualize, predict or control how we develop as people we need some ways of exploring people in action, not just in blurred photographic captivity. We have been very concerned to find reliability and stability, but have still not found as much as hoped for in many aspects of psychological functioning (Mischel 1968). Might it not be that a good way to study stability is to encourage movement; especially if what we are studying is in movement anyway? If that movement is slightly accelerated, the regularities in methods and concerns of the individual may well stand out more obviously because he himself may be in more need of affirming where he stands firmly in order to deal with changing events. This present method is aimed at catching some of the patterns of movement within and between people and thus to move towards statements

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 concerning how we both go about ‘standing still’ and ‘moving along’. In some ways this model for enquiry reverses some of the normal emphases in psychological experimentation. Normally the experiment begins when the participants enter the experimental room and ends when they leave. Here, what happens in the direct encounters is of great importance, but no more so than what happens between encounters when each person is living his own life. In this phase, each may need to be trained in the skills of taking note of the personal ‘experiments’ he enters into in the normal course of events as he explores personal issues raised in the encounters. Par- ticipants would here begin to specify the range and sorts of ‘experiments’ and ‘experimental designs’ of use in their normal living. They may also become more competent in recognizing and stating the sorts of personal and interpersonal tactics or strategies they use in order to set up situations in such a way as to make things work the way they want or to evaluate the worth of their present and proposed commitments. It is here Psychologists are human too 65

too, that one might hope to specify regularities in the sorts of approaches to problems which typified oneself or others and the sorts of solutions made possible or impossible by the adoption of these approaches.

Why ask people to give evidence for their actions or judgements? Surely anyone knows that people, as often as not, do not know why they do things. Surely most of our reasons for doing things are hidden in past conditioning or buried in the unconscious. This may or may not be so, but seems largely irrelevant to the present issue. Surely, as scientists, we are constantly looking for evidence; and so also are lawyers, car mechanics, politicians, dry rot experts and everyone else. What may be studied here are the sorts of evidence people are able to specifiy initially and at later stages when they develop greater expertise in the task. Also the kinds of beliefs, judgements or actions which they engage in without having any clearly or even vaguely formulated grounds may be made more manifest. Many important features of personal beliefs are unprovable and useful just for this reason. In this present concern with evidence it would seem useful to be able to explore further these unprovable beliefs as well as those more harshly tied to outcomes, and to begin to specify how they help maintain viable personal systems of meaning. That a person may be unable to specify some of the grounds which justify his beliefs is no reason for not exploring what sorts of beliefs or actions he can give evidence for and those for which he cannot. In specifying the nature of evidence a person is using he will be encouraged to look at the feelings, gestures, tones of voice, discrepancies between word and action and such like, which he may not normally be aware of noting. It is this part of the exercise where each participant may develop his powers of sensitive observation and inference, prized rightly by scientists as necessary accomplishments. One further point here; in talking about evidence I refer not only to what is called formal experimental evidence. Participants will probably find it important to make use of other sorts of evidence such as varieties of procedural as well as validational evidence, discussed in detail by Rychlak (1968) and more briefly with different emphases by Bromley (1968). Aware- ness of the sorts of evidence which might be sought may also be heightened by a recognition that people implicitly, if not explicitly, probably work in terms of a variety of different sorts of causal explanations. While psychological experimenters have tended to put almost exclusive reliance on material and efficient causation, it may here be important to recognize also the uses of formal and final cause explanations (Rychlak 1968, 1970).

Why have repeated encounters?

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 This model is aimed at encouraging continuing studies rather than pinpoint encounters from which few have an opportunity of learning anything or making further use of what they may have learned. In being concerned to capture not man, but some aspects of man in motion, these repeated engagements would seem essential means of studying the ways in which relationships develop. Psychologists have been eager to improve their capacities in predicting aspects of human behaviour. They have done little, though, to study the human use of predictions or explore or develop their capacities in making and modifying predictions in the light of what they take to be evidence. In repeated encounters, participants could focus on presenting formulations of what each predicts the other will have done and thought following the exchanges in the previous encounter. Each might also attempt to specify what he thinks the other will have expected him to have made of the events he faced (here something like the study of perspectives and meta-perspectives in interpersonal perception suggested by Laing et al. (1966) is being 66 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

introduced). In Kellian terms, participants in engaging in these predictive exercises are explicitly stating their anticipations, based on their role construing of the other; explicitly attempting to validate their understanding of the other in terms of what they expect his responses to have been resulting from a ‘common’ experience. Now all this has been very limited and only some of the possibilities of this approach have been mentioned. Certainly more problems may have been created than solved, but some possible solutions have been offered for certain old problems. In these specula- tions one possible framework for exploring some aspects of psychological functioning has been outlined. It would seem to allow acknowledgement of at least the following possibilities: that individuals make personal interpretations of events; that they have personal ways of organizing their personal meanings; that people are in movement and should be studied as such; that people act in relation to their understanding of other people and events and in so doing use and change their beliefs; that much of what we do, we do not fully appreciate and that the development of greater awareness may in large part be a result of an interpersonal learning process. By the way, I forgot to mention which of our two imaginary participants was the experimenter. Could you tell? In a real sense both were the experimenters and both were the subjects. Clearly their concerns in any investigation are not identical but their status and functions are indistinguishable; clearly their competence or skill in spelling out their engagements and strategies will differ markedly but their opportunities are similar. Thus the model seems to offer the kind of integral involvement of subject and experimenter I’ve been seeking and is based on the use and development of trust in a co-operative enterprise. But is it science?

Some features of a conversational science Some may feel, perhaps rightly, that what has been suggested here is quite humane in that it both elevates the subject to the status of an experimenter and brings the experimenter fully into the structure of the investigations so that he can have not merely a ring-side seat but an active part in every performance. But have we not thrown out all claims to scientific method to achieve this? Thus, in an important sense, the proposed solution to the dilemma initially posed is no solution at all. Only a few comments on this complex topic will be made here. But before this, one thing should be made clear. I do not regard the conversational model and the specific methods suggested as replacements for existing models and methods in psychology. While this seems to be the first conclusion to which many people jump, it is not so. While it is possible that insights and information gained by the approach outlined here might encourage modifications in some existing methods for some purposes, this approach in itself cannot replace them. Rather its use may suggest some ways of broad-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 ening the scope of psychology and dealing with some problems and issues which to date have been little studied. Some people, but not all, regard ‘tight’ experimentation as their method of choice for really validating their predictions and that will doubtless continue. Not everyone regards any particular approach as being his method of choice for all purposes. Acceptance of this, indeed, seems at the heart of the use of this conversational model. Some ideas about what sort of psychology would be compatible with this conversational model have been indicated elsewhere (Mair l970a, 1970b) and a few other points will be touched on here. One thing which science is centrally concerned with is achieving communicable results. Is the conversational approach not an invitation to subjective exploration of the personally unique and will not everyone take something different away from any investigation? There are certainly genuine problems about the nature of communicability with Psychologists are human too 67

this approach which have not yet been resolved, but some answers can be given now. It is true that what is found in the sort of investigation mentioned is personal but this does not necessarily make it uncommunicable. The results at every stage can be presented in the form of a series of separate or interrelated statements (see Bakan 1967, Chapter 9) by each participant about psychological events or relationships between events. For the person who makes these statements, they are likely to represent actualities for him. For others they may also accord with their own experience of similar actualities. The more people who acknowledge the same statement, the more generality the statement may have as representing what these people think is a state of affairs. Presumably very few psychological statements have universal applicability and any science tying itself only to these would be a pretty limited venture. What we may be looking for are statements with different degrees of generality. But suppose a statement by one person is not recognized by others (after similar investigation) as reflecting their experience; what then, is it useless? Not at all. If something is thought true by one person it is in that sense a fact, an actuality. For other people its revelation creates another possibility for explanation or behaviour which otherwise they might not have entertained within their personal systems. Thus the results of this sort of study may contribute to both a body of actualities and possibilities. Going further, can we accept that because one or more people believe something to be true that it is so? Not necessarily. Here is where you bring in your criteria for really accepting that something has been proved, and here as elsewhere people differ. The tendency in psychology today is to suppose that real proof needs a brittle experiment set up according to the traditions of a physical-science model. This again is quite acceptable; it reflects personal criteria concerning proof which in turn are central concerns of the conversational approach. When some participants seek to test out the worth of some of the statements resulting from some ‘conversational’ encounter, they will consider it right for them to do it this way. This choice would constitute part of the data for further examination concerning why and for what purposes they saw that form of validation more adequate than others. A point which often seems to be missed in talk about obtaining proof or validating a hypothesis is that evidence is sought for a purpose. The evidence you get for one purpose may be quite inadequate for another purpose. People differ in their purposes and in the way they gather their relevant evidence. Some methods in relation to some purposes will certainly be better (according to some criteria) than others, but which and when is here a subject for study, not for dogmatic assertion. The problem of communicability leads directly into other important concerns of psychologists. Two of these are the questions of representativeness of samples and generalizability of results. Because the method discussed starts [from] and returns to personal experience as a central core, will it not be difficult to generalize the results?

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Answers to this question presumably depend on what one wishes to generalize about. Mostly, psychologists have tried to generalize about groups of people, but if one wished to generalize about cycles of movement or sequences of methods and aims within individuals and between individuals perhaps appropriate generalizations can only be grounded in some form of enquiry similar to the one outlined. But still, won’t the usefulness of the approach be limited by the unrepresentative nature of the people who may be willing and able to co-operate? This would seem no more of a problem here than with any other approach and in some ways it may even be less of a problem. Talk of representativeness in psychology is sometimes very undiscriminating. If you want to make statements about populations, a representative sample of that population needs to be examined. But if you want to make statements about ways in which people exe- cute cycles of enquiry (raising questions, getting evidence, experimenting and revising their beliefs) it will be more informative to use people in relation to whom it is possible 68 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

to get partial answers rather than get no answers at all. Some partial answers may be useful in two ways. On the one hand, in spite of uniqueness of individuals, people are in many ways very much alike. Understanding of sequential psychological processes in one person may then have considerable relevance for understanding such processes in others. On the other hand, if features of the cycle of enquiry found in one person are not found in others, these more unique relationships will contribute to our knowledge of possibilities and so broaden our range of options for future action or explanation. Schultz (1969) notes with some alarm that most of the experimental work in psychology has been done on white, male, American college students. Clearly he is right in noting that for many purposes this sampling is quite unsatisfactorily limited. It is possible, however, if experimenters had been concerned in many of these studies to explore the ways in which these students gained, used and revised beliefs and methods in the course of their day to day lives as well as in laboratory situations, that we might now be able to say quite a lot about how the male, American college student ‘ticks’; and perhaps something about some other people besides. In adopting this conversational model, I assume a science of man in which rules and laws are created partly to sustain present patterns of behaviour and partly to be tran- scended. Thus, we may look for some rules concerning regularities of psychological functioning which will have a short life span (because once some people get to know of them they will want to make use of these regularities in order to become regular in some other way) and some which, hopefully, may have a longer life span. But all may have to be seen as subject to repeated revision and replacement over varying periods and in relation to different sorts of human experience. Stated more personally, rules found appropriate for describing and found useful by one person at one stage of his development may not satisfactorily reflect his actions or serve any useful purpose for him at another stage. This seems rather different from much present concern to establish the laws of behaviour – and that’s that. Such an approach makes one nervous in case any lay person sees the books where the precious laws are recorded because he may just go out to show he can act in such a way as to prove some of them no longer applicable. The alternative approach readily accepts that people do things with the regularities they create and know; such movement is then no threat but a necessary, desirable state of affairs. At present there seems to be the feeling among some psychologists that it’s a bit of a nuisance that everyone can interpret the same data differently, that people seem wilfully persistent in preferring their own theories to those of others and that there seems to be little sign yet of final unification of viewpoint. Some seek this unification by abandoning all theories and claiming that salvation lies only in collecting the facts; supposing ‘facts’ to be untouched by assumptions. Behind this there is, perhaps, the belief and the hope that when we know enough, we will have only one grand theory

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 of man and can then go home to put our feet up – a good job well done. This is not the view underlying the conversational model. The thought of everyone thinking in terms of the same explanations and following exactly the same logic seems frighten- ingly totalitarian and bleak; but thankfully it also seems completely unrealistic. Surely we need to encourage diversity in viewpoint, having people actively exploring what aspects of the world can look like and what can be done if one or another starting point is accepted. This seems vital if we are to hope for human development and if we are to prevent ourselves dying of boredom. What may be more profitable would be to develop a number of theories about theorizing and experimenting and a number of models within which to explore the methods and theories of individual people. Perhaps the conversational model may be the beginnings of one such model (as Personal Construct Theory is one such theory). While allowing the examination of many points of view it does not leave one adrift in the Psychologists are human too 69

choppy seas of eclecticism. Rather it provides some structure (even if a temporary and partial one) within which freely to explore, use and develop possibilities for thought and action implicit in as many theories and methods as individuals are able to create. Perhaps some uneasiness remains in some breasts about the fact that subjects participating in investigations employing this conversational model are likely to change in some aspects as the study progresses. Another difference between the conversational approach and the traditional kind may underlie this. I assume that one of the basic aims in psychology should be to find means whereby people can extend their own ways of experiencing and exploring their worlds. In other words, psychology should be contributing more directly to individual lives and the psychologist who studies people should give at least as much as he gets from them, not merely at some indefinite future time (beyond the grave for most subjects) but in the course of the actual investigations. Much concern is shown in psychology with effecting control over the behaviour of subjects in many contexts. This seems acceptable within limits, provided that primary (or at least equivalent) attention is paid both to finding ways of developing within people the means whereby they can more readily control and modulate their own ways of dealing with themselves in the world and to finding means whereby people can handle more surely the unwanted controls which others may wish to impose on them.

Psychologists as people The dilemma facing psychologists who wish to acknowledge the specifically human features of those they study (rather than the features men share with animals) is a dilemma just because psychologists too are human. When they recognize that their subjects share many of the concerns and capacities of experimenters, they must also appreciate that they, as experimenters, share the limitations of ordinary people. Psychologists, like other people, have to work within the bounds set by their own achievements and can hope to extend their competence only through the means they are capable of employing. Each has a limited viewpoint, personal and often unacknowledged assumptions, preferred theories and explanations, favoured methods for raising and answering questions. Like others, a psychologist can only subsume the assumptions, theories, methods and actions of others in relation to his personal points of view and to the extent that his own sense-making system allows. Personal Construct Theory seems to provide the sketched outline of a theory which recognizes and uses these personal structures and the Conversational Model may provide one framework within which these individual configurations can be employed as valued tools in the study of man rather than rejected as embarrassing shortcomings. As psychologists we seem to have an alarming tendency to transform important human characteristics into problems, weaknesses and sources of error. This largely seems due

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 to a continuing, if often blurred, adherence to a view of science quite inappropriate to the subject matter we seek to understand. Psychologists, in recognizing their personal limits and predilections as people, have generally sought to overcome these by excluding themselves as thoroughly as possible from the contexts within which they act as scientists. Thus we have often tried to use, or acknowledge, as little of ourselves as possible in our professional roles. But, as noted already, our subjects still persist in viewing psychologists, even when they act as experimenters, as human beings like themselves. If we are inevitably to be seen as this, why not make the best rather than the worst of it? Why not intentionally begin to use all our capacities of feeling, thought and action to aid us in creating more sensitive means to extend our understanding of ourselves and others (who are the subject matter of psychology)? It was William James who said somewhere: ‘It takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out, completely.’ This being so we can convert our personal preferences in 70 Rhetoric, discourse, and conversational inquiry

thought and action into our greatest scientific assets rather than our shameful secrets. What we discover about ourselves can contribute to our own growth and to the possible development of others, just as our discoveries about others may aid them and extend the range of possibilities we personally can employ. In all this remembering that when we study others the conclusions we reach are about persons in relation (Macmurray 1961) and not specifically about us or them. Psychology can be made different from what it has so far been and the nature of this difference depends on the imaginative possibilities which psychologists as men are able to put into effect. George Kelly explored in some detail the necessary bonds between actions and possibilities in the lives of individuals and he should perhaps have the last word here (Kelly 1969d). The actions of a psychologist, like the actions of any man, may better be understood ‘in an expanding context of all that is seen to be possible for him, rather than within the boundaries of his presumed nature, his reflexes, his brain, his complexes, his chronological age, his intelligence, or his culture. This, of course, means that, as unsuspected potentialities materialize, we shall probably have to keep changing the coordinates in terms of which we plot his life processes. But it does suggest, at the same time, that psychology can become a vital part of the on-going human enterprise. It is scarcely that now.’

Note 1 Originally published as Mair, J.M.M. (1970) ‘Psychologists are human too’, in D. Bannister (ed.) Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory, New York and London: Academic Press. Reprinted by permission of Ingrid Mair. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 PART III

METAPHORS Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 This page intentionally left bank Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CHAPTER 7

METAPHORS FOR LIVING1, 2

Over the last twenty years personal construct theory has become well known but has remained little understood. People often become excited by aspects of the theory, but then it seems to slip away somehow and they can remember only general impressions or particular catch phrases. Many seem to find it difficult to make much use of construct theory ideas in practice. Even when practice does follow on interest, it seems more often than not to boil down to some exercise in repertory grid use which may differ from older test procedures in some respects but in general perpetuates concern with measurement which the scientific tradition in psychology has long applauded. In this way much of the spirit of excitement, surprise, scope, and daring in Kelly’s writings (Kelly 1955; Maher 1969) seems to be lost. There are many reasons why we might find Kelly’s theory a difficult one to grasp. It is, for example, very unusual in the form of its presentation. No other psychological theory has been expressed as a “fundamental postulate” with a supporting cast of “corollaries.” It is difficult to know what to do with twelve such assertions, other than learn them by heart and repeat them whenever the occasion arises. In addition to this the theory is couched in remarkably abstract terms. We find none of the familiarity or warmth of words like “reward” or “punishment,” “pleasure,” “pain,” or “sex.” You find yourself instead dealing with cool, unusual things called “constructs” which have to do with “anticipation,” “validation,” and “abstraction.” What is presented as a “personal” approach seems to be conveyed in terms which are impersonal, formal, and far removed from the sorts of experiences most of us have in everyday life. It is also disconcerting since it seems to be both a theory of action and a theory for action. On the one hand it provides a frame of reference within which we can represent various forms of human action, but on the other Kelly seems to be inviting, even

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 luring, the reader into action in pursuit of concerns of personal importance. In getting us involved in such action on our own account Kelly seems to be suggesting that this theory may serve both as a springboard or launching pad and a framework within which we may chart and make sense of the ventures we undertake. This dual function of his theory is likely to be difficult to understand and disturbing for the psychological scientist taught to distance himself from his inquiries and to build up a respectable pile of evidence before risking new steps in pursuit of his concerns. One further consideration which contributes to difficulties in coping with personal construct theory is that it is not just a “theory” but a “psychology” which Kelly is proposing. Many seem to forget this startling claim and write chapters or books comparing personal construct theory with other theories, but very little attention seems to have been paid to the more fundamental task of conceptualizing and comparing psychologies. Such a task would involve the specification of whole sets of usually 74 Metaphors

unacknowledged and unnoticed values, assumptions, aims, beliefs about the nature of the world and our possible knowledge of it, criteria for evaluating experiences and events, and the like. An undertaking of this kind lies outside the scope of my present concerns, not to mention my competence, but I suspect that personal construct theory will remain something of an enigma until we can formulate more adequately our understanding of the kind of psychology which is needed to support it. My aim here is to look at a few aspects of personal construct psychology with the hope that, by approaching from a different direction, we may be able to see some of the features which make this an unusual psychology and at the same time provide it with a tradition which it would seem to be extending. My intention is first to lay aside personal construct psychology and to look instead at the older notion of metaphor; since this topic is still fairly unfamiliar in psychology, I will discuss it at greater length than is strictly necessary for my present argument. Then, through the use of metaphors, we will look again at some of Kelly’s ideas which seem to be contributions towards a psychology of living rather than merely a psychology of behaviour.

An introduction to metaphor Our common speech is littered with metaphor. We speak of feeling “dull” or “high,” “bright,” “rough,” “depressed,” “light in the head” or “heavy in the heart,” “sharp,” “keen,” “hard,” and “soft.” All these are metaphors, though they have often “faded” and need attention drawn to them if they are to be momentarily revived. Our everyday speech sometimes “bubbles,” “sparkles,” and “glows” with metaphors which “trip” off the tongue to give our expression “clarity” and “warmth,” “vibrancy” and “punch.” In poetry, of course, metaphor is vital and omnipresent. T.S. Eliot (1936) speaks, for example, of the “yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes,” as if the fog were some kind of animal. Norman McCaig (1972) speaks of male pigeons on the roof as “wobbling gyroscopes of lust.” Kathleen Raine (1970) likens “time” to a storm at sea when she writes, “Time blows a tempest – how the days run high, deep graves are open between hour and hour.” In philosophy we find that a limited number of “great metaphors” underlie much of the thinking throughout the centuries about, for instance, the nature of mind. One of these is the idea of consciousness as an impression. Thus the phenomenon of knowledge was viewed as if it were a trace of some kind imprinted on a wax tablet. This metaphor, deriving from Greece and surviving through the Middle Ages, is still apparent in ordinary speech when we talk of someone as “making a deep impression” on us or of “hammering a point home.” Another of the great philosophic metaphors coming into vogue after the Renaissance was that of the mind as a container and our experi-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 ence in consciousness as the contents of this container. Religious thinking through the ages is also rich with metaphor concerning man’s relationship with God. One view suggested that the relationship might best be viewed as that between a king and his kingdom, another as that between a clockmaker and a clock. A third approach was to make sense of the relationship as if it were like that existing between one person and another. Yet another was to think of the relationship as like that between an agent and his actions or a self and his body. Barbour (1974) notes a further metaphor suggested by A.N. Whitehead in which God’s relation to the world is viewed as if it were like that between an individual and a community. In all the sciences metaphor is readily apparent. Physicists talk of light sometimes as if it were “waves” and sometimes as “particles.” Biologists are concerned with the “genetic code,” and its “grammar” and “punctuation.” Engineers talk of metal as if it suffered “fatigue.” Metaphors for living 75

In considering society and politics, the state has been thought of in different metaphoric terms at different times. At one time it was viewed as if it were a “body” with the king as the head and the other groupings in society as other organs and limbs of the “body politic.” Hobbes describes the state as if it were a many-jointed monster, a levia- than. Rousseau suggested a different metaphor for the state and the relations between the persons comprising it when he wrote about “the social contract.” And of course the use of metaphor does not stop outside the boundaries of psychology. Everywhere you look in psychology you find metaphors peering back at you, very often pretending not to be there at all. So we find man viewed variously as if he were an animal, a machine of various kinds (formerly more mechanical and now often electronic), a battleground of warring forces, a pawn of biological and social circumstances, a plant which requires the right conditions to foster healthy growth, or even as if he were rather like a scientist. From the most “hard-nosed” and “hard-headed” approaches to psychology to the more humanistic and “soft” we find metaphoric thinking everywhere apparent.

The importance of metaphor Widely differing views on the importance or otherwise of metaphor have been expressed throughout the centuries. In general the classical view was that metaphor was characteristic of the language used in poetry, and poetry was a special kind of activity quite distinct from logic and rhetoric. Poetry made a lot of use of metaphor, but even there, metaphor was thought of essentially as a kind of decoration or embellishment placed on top of ordinary language. Metaphor was considered an extra garnish which, if used too freely, could make ordinary language too much like poetry, and obviously that would not be a good thing at all! Hawkes (1972) points out that behind this view were two basic assumptions about language and its relation to the “real” world. First, it supposes that language and reality, or words and the objective world to which they refer, are quite separate things. Second, it holds to the belief that the manner in which something is said does not significantly affect or alter what is said. The belief here is that there are “bare facts” and there are a variety of ways of talking about these which are completely separable from them. In developing this line of thought Aristotle showed his concern for good style and correct, clear use of language by warning against the unsatisfactory ambiguity involved in poetic language generally and the use of metaphor in particular. But in spite of sometimes seeming to consider metaphor almost as a vice, Aristotle did also have some appreciation of the power of metaphor. In the Poetics he went so far as to say that “the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor.” He went on in the same passage to say, “This alone cannot be imparted to another: it is the mark of genius, for

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.” I.A. Richards (1936), one of the greatest modern writers on metaphor, started his discussion of the subject in his Philosophy of Rhetoric by applauding and elaborating Aristotle’s insight that “a command of metaphor” may be of tremendous importance in life as well as literature and disagreeing completely about the impossibility of imparting it to others. For centuries after Aristotle, metaphor was castigated in various ways and even became a matter of religious debate. The Puritans concerned with Plain Style in the early seventeenth century sought to banish sinful extravagance in language. Hawkes (1972) points out that “Plain delivery” of the word was the aim, and “painted elo- quence” was seen as an enemy of the truth. The content of speech or writing was considered more important than form and was seen as quite separable from it. So far did this attitude progress that at the end of the seventeenth century Samuel Parker advocated an act of Parliament to forbid the use of what he called “fulsome and 76 Metaphors

luscious” metaphors. Even Dr. Johnson at times seemed to consider metaphor as an abuse of language. It was among some of the poets of the romantic movement that a radically different approach to understanding metaphor gained ground. They inclined to the view that metaphor had an organic relationship to language as a whole and emphasized its tremendous importance for giving expression to imagination. Metaphor was no longer considered as a mere ornament added to language but as a fundamental way of experiencing the facts. Shelley talked of metaphor as “a way of thinking and of living; an imaginative projection of the truth.” Because of this he considered it to be “at the heart of the ‘made.’” Wordsworth stressed that for him there was no essential difference between the language of prose and that of poetry, and both he and Shelley noted the linking or integrating function of the mind through the medium of metaphor. But it is perhaps Coleridge who is best known and most trenchant in his examination of “the perception of similitude in dissimilitude” and more generally for the entire “manner in which we associate ideas.” Coleridge struck a revolutionary note in his concern with metaphor as Imagination in action. I.A. Richards (1962) points out that Coleridge’s view of the mind was revolutionary in that he rejected the idea of it being passive in its recording of given “reality” but instead described it as “an active, self forming, self realising system” which creatively adapted and gave shape to the world, almost “making it up” as it went along. “Language,” says Coleridge, “is framed to convey not the object alone, but likewise the character, mood and intentions of the person who is representing it.” For Coleridge, as Hawkes (1972) points out, “Imagination stretches the mind, then because it ‘stretches’ reality by the linguistic means of metaphor. Given this, metaphor cannot be thought of as simply a cloak for a pre-existing thought. A metaphor is a thought in its own right.” Coming to the present time, I.A. Richards is at once both one of the great modern champions of Coleridge and a person who, more than almost any other, has revived concern with and understanding of the possible importance of metaphor. Richards discarded the classical view as inadequate and allied himself with much in the romantic view of the significance of metaphor. He also warns that the serious study of metaphor may plunge us into very deep psychological waters and suggests that perhaps some awareness of this has contributed to the general neglect of the subject. After a discussion of words and meanings in the Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), he claims that metaphor is the “omnipresent principle in language” and notes that “we cannot get through three sentences of ordinary fluid discourse without it.” Richards suggests that the traditional view only noticed a few of the modes of metaphor and even then limited the term metaphor to only a few of these. “And thereby,” he says, “it made metaphor seem to be a verbal matter, a shifting and displacement of words, whereas fundamentally it is a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 a transaction between contexts.” Thus he presses forward the notion of metaphor as not just a verbal affair but something fundamentally involved in the way we think, this in turn being fundamental to the way we live. In pursuing this line we find ourselves dealing not with literary matters alone but with issues central to psychology and human functioning. “In asking how language works,” Richards says, “we ask about how thought and feeling and all the other modes of the mind’s activity proceed, about how we learn to live and how that ‘greatest thing of all,’ a command of metaphor – which is great only because it is a command of life – may best, in spite of Aristotle, ‘be imparted to another.’” Like a number of other writers in recent years, Richards used the term metaphor in a sense which went well beyond a mere playing with words. For him the term was appropriately applied to all kinds of cases where we may use words compounded together and speak of one thing as though it were another. But he went further than Metaphors for living 77

this “to include, as metaphoric, those processes in which we perceive or think or feel about one thing in terms of another.” He proceeds even further to a powerful, but tantalizingly brief, sweep around broader horizons still. In this often quoted passage he presses the relevance of metaphor right to the centre of personal and interpersonal living.

A “command of metaphor”– a command of the interpretation of metaphors – can go deeper still into the control of the world that we make for ourselves to live in. The psychoanalysts have shown us with their discussions of “transference”– another name for metaphor – how constantly modes of regarding, of loving, of acting, that have developed with one set of things or people, are shifted to another. They have shown us chiefly the pathology of these transferences, cases where the vehicle – the borrowed attitude, the parental fixation, say – tyrannizes over the new situation, the tenor, and behavior is inappropriate. The victim is unable to see the new person except in terms of the old passion and its accidents. He reads the situation only in terms of the figure, the archetypal image, the vehicle. But in healthy growth, tenor and vehicle – the new human relationship and the family constellation – co-operate freely; and the resultant behavior derives in due measure from both. Thus in happy living the same patterns are exemplified and the same risks of error are avoided as in tactful and discerning reading. The general form of the interpretative process is the same with a small scale instance – the right understanding of a figure of speech – or with a large scale instance – the conduct of a friendship. (pp. 135–6)

Many others have written on the importance of metaphor, but this should be enough to illustrate the kinds of views expressed and the general changes which have come about in the appraisal of metaphor. One point which I wish to stress here is that Richards and many others view metaphor as having both broad relevance and deep significance for many aspects of human functioning. The time seems to have passed when metaphor was considered as merely some decorative or distasteful embellishment of style.

Some uses of metaphor So it seems that metaphor is considered of some significance in human affairs, but what does it do for us? What functions does it serve? Many uses have been discussed by writers on the topic, and I will try to convey some of those which seem most often mentioned.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 One general function of metaphor is to clothe the unknown with something more familiar, to reach out for what is unknown but dimly sensed through the medium of some familiar aspect of the known. Thus Marias (1967) talks of “metaphor as a mental tool, that is, a means of knowing the reality which can be known in no other way.” Owen Thomas (1969) points out that “man constantly seeks to circumscribe the unknown” and goes on to say that “the attempts to define the unknown must begin with the known”; it is on this premise that he leads into his discussion of metaphor. Donald Schon (1963) gives detailed consideration to metaphor as a means of entering the unknown for invention and discovery. The use of metaphor, or as he terms it, the “displacement of concepts,” is for him central to the development of all new concepts and theories. He goes on to say that “the process is nothing less than our way of bringing the familiar to bear on the unfamiliar in such a way as to yield new concepts while at the same time retaining as much as possible of the past.” 78 Metaphors

The metaphors we choose intentionally or implicitly adopt as ways of reaching new understandings or for approaching the future, or some novel event or person, can have important implications for us. Turbayne (1962) indicates this when he suggests that an effective metaphor acts as a “screen” through which we look at the world. It acts as a filter on the facts, suppressing some and emphasizing others. It “brings forward aspects that might not be seen at all through another medium.” Thomas (1969) notes something similar when he considers metaphor as a base for action, and the kinds of things we do, the sensitivities and priorities we elaborate, will depend on our choice of a metaphorical base. It is suggested, then, that while metaphor may be a way of making sensible, available, and even controllable some new aspects of reality through more familiar forms, it does not offer up new meanings ready-made, clean-cut, and complete. There is usually some ambiguity and an invitation to pursue possible meanings, possible paths to further meanings still only implicit but unrealized in the new comparisons. Schon (1963), in discussing both models and metaphors, for example, considers them both not solutions to problems but “programmes for exploring new situations.” “Neither models nor metaphors,” he says, “subsume analogous situations under general concepts already formulated; instead they both intimate a similarity not yet fully conceptualized. One is asked, as it were, to find features of the old in the new; one is offered new ways of looking at a phenomenon.” Barbour (1974) indicates that while it has sometimes been suggested that a metaphor may be translated exactly into other more literal language, he and many other writers cannot accept this view. He suggests that a metaphor cannot be replaced by a set of equivalent literal statements because it is “open ended.” With the use of metaphor, no limits can be set as to how far the comparisons involved may be extended, and therefore it cannot be paraphrased because it has an unspecifiable number of potentialities for articulation. He suggested further that a metaphor is not merely an illustration of an idea already explicitly spelled out, but a suggestive “invitation” to the discovery of further resemblances and differences. This incomplete, invitational, response-seeking feature of metaphor was also recognized by Coleridge, who felt that vital metaphors require a response from the receiver as an act of “completion,” just as a play needs some kind of response from an audience. This leads us to consider a further vital function of metaphor, namely, its importance in all aspects of communication. Many writers comment on the intensification of experience and language involved in the use of metaphor. Hawkes (1972) notes that the deliberate use of metaphor “intensifies language’s characteristic activity, and involves, quite literally, the creation of ‘new’ reality.” The imaginative use of metaphor can create vibrancy, immediacy, and vigour in both the making and expression of meanings. So metaphor gives “life” to our discourse. It has also been suggested by many that metaphor can be used for the expression of feelings since it seems to have the quality of conveying at the same time both ideas

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 and feelings. It not only shows new ideas or aspects but brings out new ways of feeling when it is used effectively. Metaphors also evoke images and can be conveyed in imagery, and Barbour (1974) suggests that metaphors often have emotional and valu- ational overtones. They call forth feelings and attitudes in a dynamic way so that the very language in use becomes an event in itself and not merely an account. Thus he suggests that metaphors influence our attitudes as well as our perceptions and interpretations of events. Concerning the receiving end in communication, Thomas (1969) notes that comprehension or understanding of what we are involved in, saying, or claiming “fades” in direct proportion to the loss of effective metaphors or the effective use of metaphor. Reider (1972) and others talk also of the importance of metaphor as a way of interpreting what others mean. He talks of metaphor as “the most economic condensation of understanding of many levels of experience.” The power of metaphor in therapeutic Metaphors for living 79

communication is also stressed by Haley, Jackson, and others of their orientation. Haley (1971) points out that “one of the most interesting aspects of the attempts to change people is the fact that the use of metaphors or analogies seems especially central to the process of therapy.” Haley regards the patient’s problems as an acted-out metaphor and argues that “the goal of therapy is to change the communicative behavior of the person; to change his metaphor.” Metaphor is important in communication well beyond the limits of verbal exchange. However, the function of metaphor within language is of such importance that it has been emphasized many times. Hawkes (1972) points out that I.A. Richards, Owen Bar- field, and Philip Wheelwright all consider metaphor to be central in language. Similarly, Christine Brooks-Rose suggests that the process of metaphor is located at the “heart of language” and both defines and refines it, and she suggests that through this process it refines and defines man himself. But it is not just within the formal structure of language that metaphor is considered important. Hawkes (1972) indicates that the very underpin- nings of our languages are metaphorical in their presuppositions. He points out that in some languages it is just not possible to make the sorts of statements, or think the sorts of thoughts, that can be achieved in other languages. He points out that English contains metaphorical devices in its grammar which impose a system of spatial and temporal relationship on objects and events, while certain other languages and cultures do not. Our tense system makes us break up experience in terms of past, present, and future, while languages which have nothing like this system do not impose this aspect of “reality” on all their users. “Presuppositions such as these,” he says, “affect our lives as part of a ‘reality’ which exists, concretely, ‘brutally’ and ‘out there’ beyond us.” So we come to an aspect of metaphor repeated often in writing on the subject, namely, that metaphor is a vital means whereby we both discover and create the realities of our lives and our world. “I believe that the universe is covered with a patina of interpretations,” says Marias (1967), “and most of these interpretations are metaphors. Only we tend to forget this.”He goes on to suggest that if our metaphors, our interpretations, were different in any instance we would assess situations differently and act differently in relation to what we took to be the “real” state of affairs. He goes so far as to claim that “metaphors are the foundation of everyday reality.” Wal- lace Stevens sums up this view of the relation between reality and the use of metaphor when he proposes that “reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.” Finally, Hawkes (1972) concludes his excellent overview of metaphor by recognizing that all explanations of metaphoric functioning are oversimplified, and he finishes by saying that “in the long run the ‘truth’ does not matter because the only access to it is by means of metaphor. The metaphors matter: they are the truth.”

Being used by metaphor Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 But everything is not rosy in the metaphoric garden. Problems accompany the use of metaphor. Thomas (1969), while indicating that we use metaphor to circumscribe the unknown, went on to note that by so doing, by setting boundaries around our perceptions, our awarenesses, we can and do thereby also limit what we see even as we highlight certain features. Kenneth Burke (1954), in drawing attention to some of the dangers in the use of metaphor, invokes Veblen’s concept of “trained incapacity.” This is “that state of affairs whereby one’s very abilities can function as blindnesses.” So also in the use of metaphor, our very skill in the use of particular ways of sorting and interpreting reality may be a major impediment to our being able to reach for new meanings or being able to cope with changing circumstances. We may thus be caught and fossilized by the very power available to us in particular metaphors, and this may be particularly likely if we fall into the “great danger of analogy,” which is that we take a similarity as evidence 80 Metaphors

of an identity, if we come to believe that our particular metaphoric view of reality is in very truth reality itself. Turbayne (1962) is one of the writers who most clearly recognizes both the powers and the pitfalls of metaphor. He insists that there is a great difference between using a metaphor and taking it literally, between using a model and mistaking it for the thing modelled. “The one is to use a disguise or mask for illustrative or exemplary purposes; the other is to mistake the mask for the face.”So it is that after the disguise or mask of metaphor has been worn for a considerable time, it tends to blend with the face and it becomes extremely difficult to “see through” it. If metaphor is used “without awareness,” says Turbayne, then we become victimized by it rather than empowered. In a sense, therefore, metaphor only exists where it is actively recognized, otherwise it is “hidden” and likely to be taken for reality itself. Turbayne goes on to argue that the tremendous pervasiveness of mechanical explanations in the western world is one glaring example of being victimized by metaphor. He accuses Newton and Descartes, among others, of being “unconscious victims of the metaphor of the great machine.” He suggests further that through their confusions in this manner of taking metaphor for reality, they have impregnated the whole consciousness of the western world with this same confusion. He proceeds to “undress” the metaphor of mechanism and to show that it can be dispensed with. To do this he elaborates an alternative metaphor in place of “mechanism”– the metaphor of nature as if it were a language – and to show how this can account for aspects of perception which were previously difficult to explain. His primary intention in this exercise is not to advocate his new metaphor but rather to make us more aware of the metaphors we use in explorations of “reality” so that we may be less likely to join the legions of those who have fallen victims in mistaking their own pretences for final truths. The warnings given by Turbayne can be taken a little further. As noted earlier, Haley (1971) considers the problems presented by patients in therapy as if they were metaphors. More recently, Wright (1976), approaching the topic from a psychoanalytic perspective, suggests rather that metaphor and symptom should be distinguished. He views both metaphors and symptoms as symbolic structures which present one thing in the semblance of another, but he argues that while the symptom “conceals” and leads to a “restriction” of view, the metaphor “reveals” and leads out towards new possibilities. For Wright, a metaphor “is a product of an ego that is going towards a problem and attempting to grasp it,” while a symptom “is a product of an ego that is turning away from a problem and refusing to see it.” Thus he suggests that “whether symptom or metaphor arises depends on the attitude of the ego that is confronted with the problem.” Thus, while in Turbayne’s terms symptoms could be regarded as instances of being used by metaphor, Wright is bringing to our attention the possibility that very often “being used” may not be the passive thing it seems. Often when we are

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 “victimized” by metaphor we may in fact be “willing” victims of our own metaphors or of those offered to us in the traditions of our culture. Often we may be active perpe- trators of the victimization which ensues from the misuse of metaphor. It may be that we already have not only a considerable facility in the use of metaphor for elaborative ventures but similar skill in turning away from problems to be used by the metaphors we might otherwise command. Thus from consideration of both the uses and abuses of metaphor it may no longer seem so strange to suppose that “a command of metaphor” may turn out to be “the greatest thing by far.”

But what is metaphor? So far I have largely skirted round the question of what metaphor is or how metaphors function. We have seen already that there have been considerable changes in the Metaphors for living 81

importance attributed to metaphor through the centuries, and ideas of what constitutes metaphor have changed accordingly. For Aristotle and many after him, metaphor involved giving a thing a name that really belonged to something else. It was a verbal exchange or crossover. The Oxford Dictionary reflects this traditional view in defining metaphor as “the figure of speech in which a name or descriptive term is transferred to some object to which it is not properly applicable.” The word metaphor itself derives from the Greek and means literally “a carrying across.” It is in this limited verbal sense, as a figure of speech, a kind of intentional verbal mistake, that most of us are likely to have encountered metaphor in language or literature classes in school. We are likely to have met it especially in relation to poetry as a way of playing with words to achieve certain dramatic or other effects. Two major changes then took place over the centuries, and especially during the romantic period, which have influenced many modern views on metaphor. First of all, the forms of language used in poetry, which Aristotle separated off from other forms of discourse, have increasingly been accepted as essentially similar to the kinds of language we use every day. Second, and accompanying this change, there has been a fundamental reappraisal of the importance of metaphor for human understanding. This has extended our appreciation of its scope and mode of functioning well beyond the purely “verbal” transpositions noted by Aristotle. Many writers have tried to grasp some satisfactory conception of metaphor and how it works. In this connection it is attempts to understand “metaphoric functioning” rather than any specific “metaphor” which will concern us here. One good example of an extended or more generalized concern with the mode of functioning of metaphor is provided by Donald Schon (1963). His suggestion is that “in at least one of its senses the process of metaphor is nothing more or less than displacement of concepts.” As we have noted already, he goes on to say that for him the “displacement of concepts” is central to the development of all new concepts and that the metaphoric process is “nothing less than one way of bringing the familiar to bear on the unfamiliar, in such a way as to yield new concepts while at the same time retaining as much as possible of the past.” Schon in fact chooses to restrict the term metaphor to the results of the process of displacement, so for him displacement is the mode of operating while metaphors are the things thrown up thereby. Thus metaphor, the process of metaphor, involves displacement, transposition, a carrying across of concepts from one kind of event to apply to another. But it cannot be viewed simply as a “conceptual” affair. Richards (1936), as we have seen, was concerned to extend the scope of metaphor, and he suggested that metaphor was a “borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts.” So he emphasizes “thinking” rather than “concept formation,” and for him “thinking” is often used as a shorthand way of referring to the “mind’s activity” in general. Through

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 this means he extends understanding of the functioning of metaphor, the process of metaphor, into realms of feeling and activity as well as thought and language. It is also worth noting that Richards emphasizes the active nature of the metaphoric process, and rather than talk of some bland or passive transference, he uses words like “transaction,” “borrowing,” and “intercourse.” Turbayne (1962) is also concerned with widening the classical meaning of metaphor. Like Richards, he seeks to go well beyond the transfer of “names” suggested by Aristotle. He suggests we could better view the process of metaphor as the “presentation of the facts of one category in the idioms appropriate to another.” He insists further that metaphor need not be expressed in words and that activities of many kinds, if they involve the presentation of the facts of one category in idioms appropriate to another, can legitimately be considered metaphorical. Thus he holds that the artist, for example, who “speaks” in paint or clay can be considered to be speaking in metaphor, 82 Metaphors

just as for Haley, the patient who “speaks” in terms of “complaints” and “problems” is considered to be functioning metaphorically also. Turbayne also stresses another important feature of metaphor which is often obscured. In metaphoric functioning, he points out, there is a “pretence that something is the case when it is not.” He stresses that in metaphoric functioning we are in a sense making a mistake by acting as if one thing were really something which it is not. Thus, for Tur- bayne, in metaphoric activity we are somehow representing the facts as if they belonged to one logical type of category, or range of types of categories, when they actually belong to another. In this way he suggests that an effective metaphor acts as a “screen” through which we look at the world; it filters the facts, suppressing some and emphasizing others, bringing into prominence some aspects that might not be seen at all through another medium. As we have noted already, Turbayne warns that what may be called a “screen” or “filter” can readily become more like a “disguise” or “mask” which hides, obscures, and confuses rather than clarifying, highlighting, and revealing. Turbayne, Hawkes, Thomas, Richards, and others also stress the breadth of their conceptions of metaphor by considering as variations of metaphor all the forms of speech which have traditionally been distinguished. Thus simile (where the “like” or “as if” aspect of metaphor is stated more evidently), synecdoche (where a part of something is “carried over” to stand in place of the whole thing, as in speaking of “hands” on a ship rather than “men”), metonymy (where the name of one thing is transferred to take the place of something else with which it is associated, as when speaking of “the Crown” rather than “the monarch”), catachresis (where a thing which has no name is given a name belonging to something else, as in using ordinary words in a technical sense), and oxymoron (where two words or ideas which are not only incompatible but nearly contradictory in essence are linked, as in saying “the cold fire of his eyes”) are all forms of metaphoric functioning. So also allegory can be seen as an extended metaphor or combination of many interrelated metaphors in the form of a story or drama, and fable, parable, and myth can also be included. Personification is also regarded as a form of metaphoric functioning where inanimate objects or abstract concepts can be treated as if they possessed human features. In a similar way paradigms and models can be viewed as specially elaborated forms of metaphoric functioning. A further important point about metaphor is made by Owen Thomas (1969). He suggests that, strictly speaking, only man can “make statements” which are not true, and we often state ideas in terms which are logically contradictory. So in metaphor we are really making a “mistake” or a “series of mistakes” to some end. But Thomas reminds us that we need to have some systematic and accepted structuring of events, otherwise it would be impossible to make such “mistakes.” Language is such a complex, systematic structure whose rules, grammar and syntax give coherent form to our world, though no language encapsulates the ultimate forms of reality. Through

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 metaphor or the kind of “mistake making” which metaphor involves, we break the “rules” in various ways and so stretch the boundaries of our understanding. Such “stretching” is done by both keeping the rules and breaking them. A “command of metaphor” would seem then to involve some skill in breaking the rules, but this can only be done by having and respecting conventions which can be broken. As in some modern poetry, jumbles of metaphors with little or no structure against which to highlight the invention of new meanings may result in strain and confusion (thus possibly, after all, forming an effective metaphor of much of our modern experience of living) and we may be in danger of losing both the “baby” of new meanings with the “bath water” of accepted forms. So it is well not to forget what Schon (1963) pointed out clearly, namely, that metaphor has both a radical function in forging new possibilities and a conservative function of preserving what is good and sustaining in the forms of the past. Metaphors for living 83

Some metaphors of metaphor Wallace Stevens pointed out that there was “no such thing as a metaphor of a metaphor.” However, before turning to look at some aspects of personal construct psychology from the perspective of metaphor, a brief look at some partial metaphors about aspects of metaphoric functioning may be useful. Consider first the parts which compose the metaphor. I.A. Richards seems to have been one of the first modern writers to recognize the need for some clear terminol- ogy for talking about the component parts of any metaphor. He insists that the word “metaphor” be used for the whole double unit rather than any part of it. He suggests, further, that the “underlying idea or principal subject” be called “the tenor.” The basic analogy which is used to embody or carry the tenor, the “general drift” of the discourse, he refers to as “the vehicle.” These elements transact with each other, and their “transaction” is the meaning of the metaphor. Terms such as these facilitate more precise discussion of aspects of metaphoric functioning, but they must still be used lightly, with some delicacy, if we are to avoid destroying every metaphor by routinely ripping it into two necessary and identifiable parts. William Empson (1953) indeed claims that any clear-cut distinction between tenor and vehicle can often hardly be maintained when the number of “possible” meanings offered by any metaphor increases, without any one necessarily becoming clearly dominant over the others and thus identifiable as “the tenor.” Rather than focusing on the constituent parts of metaphor, Philip Wheelwright (1962) suggests another way of talking about metaphoric functioning. He suggests that there are two main modes of operation of metaphor. On the one hand there is the outreaching and extending of meaning by means of comparison, which he refers to as epiphor. On the other hand there is the creation of new meanings by means of juxta- position and synthesis, which he refers to as diaphor. Another approach is that of Sper- ber, quoted by Rowe (1975), who was interested in the dominant metaphors which spring from deep-seated features or tendencies in any person’s mind. These could act as “centres of expansion,” continuously suggesting further similes and metaphors for the description of other experiences, or as “centres of attraction,” whereby the person continuously calls on and enlists analogies from other contexts to help describe and elaborate centrally important metaphors with maximum precision, freshness, and variety. Thus he considers a twofold movement of metaphors – from and towards a person’s emotional centre. A different kind of overview of metaphor, or metaphor concerning some aspects of metaphor, is that provided by Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives (1945). He talks of metaphor as providing and using a “perspective.” “Metaphor,” he says, “is a device for seeing something in terms of something else. . . . A metaphor tells us some-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 thing about one character considered from the point of view of another character. And to consider A from the point of view of B, is of course to use B as a perspective upon A.”Thus, when one person tries to see things from the point of view of another, to feel what the other feels, he is in Burke’s sense involved in the process of metaphor whereby he tries to shift his base in order to gain a new perspective on the realities of the world. Finally, here it should be noted that association, long stressed within psychology, is what one writer termed a sine qua non for semantic change generally and for the making and understanding of metaphor in particular. But mere association is not enough, nor is any view of association of a mechanical kind whereby billiard balls collide or mutely fall together into the same pockets of the mind. The association involved in metaphor seems to require active or interactive participation for both its creation and interpretation. C.K. Ogden’s comments, quoted by Burke (1954), seem relevant here. He suggests that “the governing principle in association is the direction of interest, and 84 Metaphors

contiguity only works inside this principle. Clearness and consecutiveness of thinking, in other words, depends primarily upon clearness in our interests. Perhaps most of the blunders of thought are due to confused and mixed interests.”This seems therefore to suggest that the life concerns of the individual, his “interests,” have to be considered and identified if we are to understand association in general and metaphor in particular.

Metaphors and constructs Perhaps enough has now been said about metaphor, its possible importance, uses, and modes of operating to make it clear that there are numerous similarities here with the concerns expressed in personal construct psychology. My intention in presenting so many of the ideas of other people on metaphor has been to make it apparent that the seemingly separate worlds of literature, poetry, art, invention, and the use of language on the one hand and the psychological account of human action developed by George Kelly on the other have, in fact, a great deal in common. While personal construct psychology may still be an unusual creature within “scientific” psychology, it has a very familiar air if approached, in part at least, from the perspective of all the work on metaphor which is found within a more “literate” tradition. Because of this family resemblance we may hope for some more fruitful cross-fertilization and development of personal construct psychology than seems so far to have been achieved within the psychological and “scientific” world where we have mostly tried to contain it. Many writers emphasize that metaphor is an important way by which we create new meanings, making sense and alternative sense where there was little or none before. Meta- phor, in short, is a means of entering the unknown through the gateway of the known. Kelly was also concerned with just this matter, and indeed, his paper on “The Psychology of the Unknown”(1977) was an essay on “how man, from his position of relative ignorance, can hope to reach out for knowledge that no one has yet attained.” Kelly went so far as to say he regarded this confrontation with the unknown as “a primary problem for the psychologist,” though he doubted if many of his colleagues saw it that way. In this “reaching out”Kelly was uncertain whether we might better consider reality to be “out there” or “deep within us,” but he took the view that we never know reality completely. All our knowledge is approximate and is subject to revision as more fruitful approximations are invented. Similar views are expressed by writers on metaphor. They also see man as not only “uncovering” but “making” our realities by means of the “interpretations” we place on events. Both Kelly and writers on metaphor suggest that all our approaches to reality are through the “screens,” “goggles,” or “masks” which we construct. We noted earlier the comment by Wallace Stevens to the effect that reality is a “cli- ché” from which we can escape by the use of metaphor. Kelly echoes a similar concern

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 when he notes that to “transcend the obvious” is the basic problem for man. For Kelly, we do this by “construing” and “reconstruing” reality, but he makes it clear that we cannot hope to “reconstrue” events if we are convinced of the inescapability of our present interpretations and actions. Kelly here lays great stress on the need to adopt a kind of “invitational” mood in our language so that we can take our statements as invitations to exploration rather than mere assertions of hard necessities. We noted a similar invitational aspect of metaphor. In metaphor, also, we noted the importance of as if, or the willing use of make-believe. Kelly likewise placed as if, or “hypothetical thinking,” at the centre of his approach as a vital means whereby invitations to new explorations, new actions, or new meanings could be explored without overwhelming guilt or threat. Metaphor has been described as a tool or instrument for both extending and clarifying language and other aspects of our living, as a way of reaching for what is new while preserving aspects of the old, as providing bases for action and experience. All these Metaphors for living 85

echo concerns found in Kelly’s writings on construing. In our discussion of metaphor we noted that it could be a means whereby “perceptions” and “conceptions” could be identified and altered but also “attitudes” expressed and “emotions” formed and conveyed, all at the same time. All this is also reflected in Kelly’s writing on the nature of constructs. He was particularly concerned to break down the old boundary lines in our thinking which had become traps ensnaring us in the belief that our own fictions of “feeling,” “thought,” and “will” were necessary divisions in reality itself. But just as we can be used by metaphor or metaphor may be used to close down rather than open up new possibilities, so also, Kelly makes clear, constructs are avenues of freedom or ruts which prevent new movement. Our construct systems, according to Kelly, offer us a network of pathways for movement, but we cannot strike out across country unless we can build new paths, new constructions, to carry such movement. I.A. Richards also points out that we may be directed as much by the metaphors we are avoiding as by those we are using intentionally. This again reminds us of Kelly’s injunctions to listen for what the person is not saying as well as what he is drawing attention to by affirming. Furthermore, according to Kelly, much of our living is likely to be an acting out of nonverbal or preverbal constructs operating below the grasp of our awareness. Again we found in the discussion of metaphor the danger of being tyrannized by metaphors when we become unaware of what they are and how we are using them. Our comprehension of ourselves or others fades as our awareness of the metaphors we are using diminishes, just as such comprehension increases as we appreciate the constructions which inform our actions or the actions of others. This list of similarities between metaphor and construing could readily be extended, but these similarities in no way imply identity of interest. Metaphors are not constructs and “construct” is not just a new name for “metaphor.” As we have noted, metaphor involves “sort-crossing,” that is, making a kind of “mistake” whereby you think about, view, feel, or act in relation to one thing as if it were really some other kind of thing. Although no sharp distinctions can be drawn, constructs, on the other hand, are talked of more as “sortings” rather than “sort-crossings.” The practical task through which constructs are elicited is a “sorting” task whereby the person seeks ways in which “two things are alike and different from a third.” Sorting of this kind is a way by which a person attempts to be “appropriate” or to structure the “conventions” of his life. Sort-crossing, on the other hand, is a sorting activity which breaks the “conventions” and through which the person apparently becomes “inappropriate” in order that he may perhaps become “appropriate” in a different way. A construct also seems to be a more abstracted notion than metaphor; at least I think Kelly considered it so. It is also more clearly delineated than metaphor in being defined from the beginning as a particular dimension of similarity/difference, while metaphor is more multifaceted, less directional, and more ambiguous.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 In addition to all this, metaphor and construct are generally discussed in different kinds of contexts and derive from different areas of discourse. They carry therefore different kinds of connotations which are likely to affect our use of them and thinking about them. Thus, for me at least, constructs often seem linear, directional, geometri- cal axes of reference which seem hard, straight, angular, intellectual, and “digital.” Metaphor, on the other hand, often carries an aura of associations which are flowing, colourful, sinuous, sensuous, surprising, ambiguous, inviting, warm, rich, protean. However, since the similarities in concerns are so striking, differences in emphasis and association such as these may be suggestive of further developments in our consideration of personal construct theory. Metaphor and its study has a very long history within the realms of poetry, literature, art, religion, and invention, while constructs were born into a modern world of psychology which had devoted itself to a hard-line scientific tradition valuing measurement, precision, mathematics, prediction, specification, 86 Metaphors

and objectivity. Perhaps by viewing personal construct psychology only within this kind of scientific tradition we may blind ourselves to possibilities inherent in this new psychology and fail to consider what science itself may yet become if it begins to be able to incorporate more of the diverse forms of human life and concerns. It could almost be argued that personal construct psychology is a psychology of man as a maker and user of metaphor. However, my present aims are much more modest, since I want only to highlight some aspects of personal construct psychology through the use of metaphor in the hope that some features of the kind of psychology we may here be dealing with can thereby become more apparent.

Aspects of personal construct psychology George Kelly made a point of trying to specify some of the major assumptions he was making about the nature of our relations to and involvement with “reality,” but he was a little less clear in specifying a number of other aspects of his approach, which may account for some of the difficulty many people seem to have in coming to terms with his psychological perspective. I want here to draw attention to four suggestions which he seems to me to be making concerning man and the nature of inquiry. I want to do this through the use of a number of metaphors which make it clearer why Kelly’s position may be problematic for many of us and clearer also what kind of “party” we are letting ourselves in for if we accept his “invitation” to pursue our personal concerns through the framework he offers. The metaphors I’ve chosen involve considering “man” as if he were a “mystery,” and “inquiry” as if it involved “making” and “making up,” “venture,” and “indwelling.” None of this includes much consideration of the main content of the theory as enshrined in the fundamental postulate and corollaries, but rather the broader context within which the theory is presented. After this, and again through the use of metaphor and some of the considerations raised in the changing understanding of metaphor, we will look briefly at a few further issues in the kind of psychology Kelly has outlined.

Man as a mystery It may not be immediately apparent on first reading Kelly’s writings that he ascribed no essential nature to man, but rather talks of the ways in which he proceeds, the ways in which he reaches out for events by construing their replications. But since “ways of proceeding,” “events,” and “replications” are all constructed by man himself, we are left wondering about what his nature may be. Kelly tells us, in discussing the fundamental postulate, that “the person” is to be central and not any bits or pieces of the person. The fundamental postulate states therefore that “a person’s processes are psychologi-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 cally channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events.” A distinction is made between “person” and “processes” and his “ways” of anticipating events, and thereafter the whole focus of the theory is on further understanding of “the ways” by which the mystery of the “person” and his “processes” is made manifest. As in the fundamental postulate, so in nearly all the corollaries, the “person” is mentioned and placed at the centre. Thus, “A person anticipates . . . “ (Construction Corollary), “Persons differ . . . “ (Individuality Corollary), “A person chooses . . . “ (Choice Corollary), “A person may successively employ . . . ” (Fragmentation Corollary). But still the kind of nature which this “person” has who chooses, employs, anticipates, and differs is left unspecified. Similarly, in defining his constructs concerning transition, Kelly talks repeatedly of “awareness”– awareness of dislodgment, awareness of incidental or comprehensive change, awareness of events lying outside the range of one’s constructs. Who is “aware” of all these things? It is the “person” of course, but again, what sort of creature is that? Metaphors for living 87

As mentioned earlier, Kelly thought that one of the vital tasks for man was to “transcend the obvious,” to break out of the “cliché” which we tend to make of our reality. So at the centre of his psychology is a huge question mark concerning the nature of man: a mystery, rather than any suggestion of a pat answer or a comfortable conclusion. In contrast to this, many of the approaches to man in much of psychology have been so simplified and apparently “conclusive” that they have stunted the imagination and obscured the freedoms of generations of psychologists. Rather than sensing and respecting man as an astonishing mystery, we seem often to have turned him instead into a “cheap thriller” or an “open and shut case.” In recognizing and suggesting that we approach man as a mystery, Kelly is not proposing either a defeatist or an obscurantist position. He is saying rather that man is an endless mystery which we have repeatedly been making different things of throughout the centuries. We have seen something of his struggles and sufferings and something of the things he has created and destroyed. We have seen the terrible heresies of one age becoming the commonplace assumptions of the next. Man has made many different things of himself in different times and in different places. Because of considerations such as these, Kelly suggests that if we are to make something more of the mystery of man – or any man – we should not limit ourselves by considering him only within the fleeting moments of a psychological experiment, or in the first five years of life, or even within a ten-year follow-up. Kelly suggests that we may be able to gain a fuller perspective on the possible nature of man if we consider him within the span of his own life and, beyond that, within the sweep of the centuries. At any moment each man is suspended somewhere between his own birth and his own death, but also between the birth and death of the human race, the birth and death of the world, and more. If we only view him within very narrow limits of time and place we may dismiss many human struggles as trivial or neurotic which may appear in a different light if we consider a wider context and a longer journey. The whole direction and thrust of Kelly’s concern is with what man may yet make of himself, with what he may yet turn out to be. The position Kelly took was that we do not yet know what man may become. He is limited by the limits of his own daring and ingenuity. A major task for psychology, therefore, is to extend that ingenuity and provide means whereby we may dare to attempt what previously would have seemed impossible. Personal construct psychology itself has to be considered in relation to aims such as these.

Inquiry as venture The metaphors of “adventure,” “exploration,” and “quest” seem to reflect something of the spirit which permeates much of Kelly’s writing. Kelly indeed claimed that this

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 approach in psychology was an invitation to “immediate adventure,” since he was suggesting that we can make ourselves and can make ourselves differently if we so choose. He took the position that we are not bound by our conditioning or our family dynam- ics, or delineated completely by our heredity, unless we choose so to be. He is thus inviting us to consider seriously that we can be different if we go out and do differently, we can become different by acting differently. We are probably limited in many ways, but we do not know for sure what these limits may turn out to be when we challenge them with imagination and determination. Our imagination or ingenuity is something we can work to develop, whereas we may scarcely think this worth pursuing if we suppose our limitations are preordained and in nature. This invitation to venture is a difficult one to cope with, since it puts up to question all our accepted reasons for not being as different as we so often claim we want to be. It raises the uncomfortable possibility that we might ourselves be determining that our 88 Metaphors

fate be thought of as already determined, we might ourselves be digging the very graves which with increasingly desperate cries we claim are getting deeper and are threatening to swallow us completely. This may be an uncomfortable possibility to face, but there is worse to come if we try to translate Kelly’s invitation into practice. If we dare to step out of our usual ruts or beyond the safe and familiar routines of our lives, we are liable, very quickly, to find ourselves experiencing considerable distress in many forms, which Kelly terms “anxiety,” “guilt,” “threat,” and “fear.” The kind of venture which seems to me to assume a central place in personal construct psychology is not of the “big game hunting” or the “conquering Everest” variety. It is something both more homely and more audacious. What Kelly seems to be advocating is something like “life on the frontier”– living on the frontiers of your experience rather than within cosily settled conventions or as a more-or-less willing victim of the demands of tradition. You can almost hear the “wagon trains moving westward,” seeking new pastures and more space for living, as you read Kelly’s writings. Venture of this kind, even if it may seem to be on a very small scale, if it is to persist in the face of dangers and deprivations, requires the kind of courage described by Paul Tillich (1952) in The Courage to Be or the “anchorite and eagle courage” rather than “courage before witnesses” referred to by Nietzsche (1911). One of the unusual features of Kelly’s psychology is that the constructs he outlines to subsume experiences of change and transition are not so much accounts of what we are like, but are rather forewarnings, anticipations, preparations for what we are likely to experience if we venture even a little beyond the security of our settled ways. His “constructs of transition” are like warnings and strategies for recognizing and perhaps coping with trials and terrors awaiting each venturer as he lays himself at risk by crossing the boundaries of the known within his own life. So what kinds of experiences are we likely to have to cope with if we accept Kelly’s invitation to venture, if we begin to “move out west”? Even before the journey properly begins we may experience a sense of panic sweeping through us. We may sense that once we leave the safety of “home,” things may never be the same again, that we may never be the same again. This terror may scream to us to be sensible, to stay at home, to hold to what we have and know, to leave well alone. This is threat. It is described by Kelly as “the awareness of an imminent comprehensive change in one’s core structures.” Many ventures big and small stop just here, often before they have really begun. Therefore if we are to be able to accept Kelly’s invitation to venture, we will have to learn both how to recognize and to cope with such threat. This may itself be no easy matter and may be sufficient to discourage all further attempts at movement. If we overcome this first hurdle and manage to move out a little into what is for us “unknown territory,” all may go well for a time. Then, as the strange emptiness and noises of the unknown get through to us as we clutch our favourite protective blankets,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 we may be gripped by an undermining sense of “being at sea” or “being lost.” We may experience all sorts of alarms and panics which unsettle the very foundations of our normally accepted understandings of ourselves and the world. All this is anxiety, which Kelly described as “the awareness that the events with which one is confronted lie mostly outside the range of convenience of his construct system.” Anxiety is meaninglessness, the loss of any adequate way to structure our experience of ourselves in relation to the world, it is to some degree an inevitable accompaniment of venture, and not only courage but some skill in making sense where there is nonsense and confusion is needed. The acquisition of some such skill seems a necessary prerequisite if venture of the kind Kelly is suggesting is to be pursued beyond the first few steps. Many more specific dangers are likely to loom up which are fairly clear and identifiable. These dangers, which do not leave us victims of the unsettlement of anxiety or the disruption of threat, may be experienced as fear. This, for Kelly, is “the awareness Metaphors for living 89

of an imminent incidental change in one’s core structure.” Though no major challenge to the way we constitute or make sense of ourselves or the world is at stake here, ways of coping with fear need also to be learned if such dangers are to be overcome and the venture continued. But even if we manage to deal with experiences such as these, we may still find ourselves with a deep sense of disorientation, wondering what has become of the person we used to be and used to know. We may find ourselves no longer able to recognize or even own the kind of person we are beginning to become. This is the experience of guilt, which Kelly describes as “the awareness of dislodgment of the self from one’s core role structure.” This sense of loss of self may be so traumatic as to leave no apparent ways back to some secure sense of what we used to take ourselves as being. The extreme danger here is not from other people or external dangers but from suicide as a desperate attempt to provide a solution, even though it proves to be a final solution. Because of this, the development of ways of coping with “guilt,” which is the sense of “sin” involved in new ventures, is vital if the invitation to personal venture is accepted and is to be carried to some constructive conclusion. Because he thought it so important that any venturer learn to explore and come up with new kinds of solutions, Kelly included in his “training manual” the outlines of two strategies for tackling problems with honesty and openness. The first of these he called the creativity cycle. The “loosening” phase of this involves the skills of backing off from an immediate problem, looking around, loosening up, taking a fresh perspective, free associ- ating, getting more possibilities available for consideration. Thereafter the various tactics or skills involved in the “tightening” phase have to be brought into operation, whereby some particular possibility is clarified and sharpened so that it can be acted on and the resulting outcome evaluated and the procedures thereafter modified as necessary. Intersecting with this particular strategy is another which Kelly refers to as the c-p-c cycle. This involves “circumspection”(looking around for new possibilities), “pre- emption”(selection of particular possibility), and “control”(the decision or choice which precipitates the person into action). Only the most general outlines of these two strategies are provided by Kelly, and a great deal of detailed work would have to be done with them if they are to become personally effective approaches to action. Thus again, preparation for ventures seems to involve considerable work in becoming profi- cient in the use of strategies such as these. In considering adventure, I suggested that Kelly’s concerns were “homely” as well as “audacious.” What may seem to an onlooker as a modest, homely venture, if venture at all, may however be for the person involved something of terrifying uncertainty within his particular world. You will not appreciate the terrors and dangers facing me in any venture unless you understand what I am risking, or what in Heinrich Ott’s (1967) words, is “ultimately at stake” for me. In any venture you put yourself at risk to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 some degree, and while an invitation to venturesomeness is offered by Kelly, it would seem not unreasonable to treat it with caution. Much may be at stake.

Understanding as making and making up The metaphor of “making,” and indeed “making up,” is fairly explicit in Kelly’s writing. Thus, in the very word “construction”Kelly is perhaps suggesting that we view our inquiries, our ventures as if they involved making, building, designing, planning, erecting (and perhaps some of his own early interest in engineering is reflected here). At first sight it would seem that this emphasis on making, on the man-made, would fit in well with our manufacturing types of society. But it has not yet turned out to be so, and perhaps a little further elaboration of the metaphors may give some clues as to why this may be. 90 Metaphors

Before doing this, though, it is well to remember that Kelly talks of “making” always within the wider context of the ultimate mystery of man and his world. So, unlike those who emphasize the use of more mechanistic metaphors of man in psychology, Kelly is concerned with the ways in which we make means by which to realize something of the mystery of our as yet unrealized and even unimagined possibilities. Any- thing but the most superficial acknowledgment of the central mystery of man seems to be shunned by most psychologists and especially by those who consider themselves most “realistic” and “scientific.” Thus, the tenor of the times is often to approach our subject matter with little respect and with the general assumption that there are only a few more hitches to be sorted out before we have his “real nature” trapped and tamed. All this tends to mean that we create methods of inquiry which aim to pin man down as quickly and effectively as possible so that we may claim to predict and control him, rather than giving our energies to developing, to making, means whereby he may be helped to make more of himself. “Making” for Kelly was clearly a kind of “do-it-yourself” activity, and making things by and for yourself in this way is a lot harder, more time-consuming, frustrat- ing, and demanding than buying or borrowing the “ready-made” hand-me-downs of your culture. But learning to make, not merely things, but your very self seems to be what Kelly was suggesting. He proposed in fact that his philosophical position could be described as one of “ontological responsibility.” For him the underlying task of man was to undertake increasing responsibility for his own actions, even those he may presently consider irrational or beyond his control. Learning to assume such responsibility is clearly a serious undertaking, since it involves taking into our own hands all the duties and problems of making our own way in the world and the demanding, endless challenges of making the means whereby we may be able to make something more of ourselves than we have so far achieved. “Making” also involves many phases of activity which we can readily forget when we become accustomed to living by “inherited” or “ready-made and polythene wrapped” methods. It involves getting and preparing the materials, planning the sequences of how things should be done, recognizing that things cannot be rushed and time is involved, appreciating that it involves skill in the use (even the making) of the tools by means of which we can work on the materials in producing the results we are seeking. All this requires a real valuing of the thing being made and a respect for the tools, materials, and means whereby it is being made. Thus it is perhaps not so surprising that Kelly’s invitation to “make” ourselves and our meanings in the world has been received with less than avid enthusiasm. There is another point which should also be made here which emphasizes still more the enormousness of the task waiting for us if we consider entering the “homemade- person” business. As soon as we begin we are likely to find ourselves slap up against the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 question: What should we make of ourselves? Each person has to ask what he should try to be, or simply, as Kelly puts it in “A psychology of the optimal man”(1967), “what ought he to be?”Since there is no one around other than the person himself to give an answer to this question, the responsibility and the uncertainty remain his own. This kind of choice may again be a sufficient reason to justify abandoning the whole venture of making one’s own way. But all this is only to touch the very edge of the disturbance to our settled ways which Kelly is suggesting. It seems to me to be one of Kelly’s vital contributions to psychology that he stresses that “making” very often involves “making up.” If we get involved in “making ourselves” or “making our own sense of the world,” we will find ourselves concerned with “invention” and not just the shoring up of already prepared structures. Kelly (1969f) suggested, in “The language of hypothesis,” a new mood for the use of language – the invitational mood – which would be useful here. Using Metaphors for living 91

language in this way we would not refer to fixed realities, as with the indicative mood, but would invite exploration of alternatives, as when we ask, “Suppose we regard the floor as if it were hard,” or “Let us view your father as if he were shy.” Statements such as these, says Kelly, leave “both the speaker and the listener, not with a conclusion on their hands, but in a posture of expectancy – suppose we regard the floor as hard, what then?”Such an approach to language and reality orients one to the future and not merely to the present or the past. “It invites the listener to cope with his circumstances . . . in new ways.”Kelly goes on further to say that make-believe is indeed an essential feature of science and that science tends to make progress by scientists entertaining propositions which appear initially to be quite preposterous. This same kind of concern with “as if” is involved in metaphor, and the same kind of invitation to pursue the “fictions of mankind” was outlined in some detail by Vaihinger (1924) in The Philosophy of “As if.” But are we in any position to accept such an invitational mood, to approach the world as if it were our oyster, a cuddly teddy bear, or a hair shirt of fiendish efficiency? Once again I think this turns out to be a more demanding kind of invitation than may at first appear. Many people, when invited to think or act as if, find this an almost unintelligible suggestion. Their attitude may be summed up as, “What is the case is the case and there is no point in denying it.” With this view it may well seem ridiculous to suppose that “hard realities” could ever be approached or constructed differently. But what Kelly is suggesting is not naive optimism but rather that we may be limited primarily by the degree of our own and our society’s ingenuity in inventing and daring to explore alternative possibilities of how we might take things to be. If the invitation is taken up it seems often to get stuck after the first improbable step. “So what if I do consider my father to be shy rather than uncaring, what then? That still doesn’t alter the fact that he has made me so miserable.”What seems to be needed here is skillful alternation between “as if” thinking and if . . . then thinking. The if . . . then mode of thinking is the more commonly discussed one whereby we make use of the accepted rules of language and logic, work out implications, and consider relevant evidence in support of our propositions. The if . . . then form is just as important as the other but rests on it and follows after it. While a considerable amount of attention has been paid to this type of approach – if such and such then such and such follows – in psychology, the as if mode has been largely ignored or left implicit and therefore confusingly vague. We seem generally to be less sure of what to do and where to go from our first steps in as if thinking, or make-believe, than with the more bounded and familiar routines of if . . . then. Often, also, if our first excursions in as if – pretence or make-believe – seem to open up some new idea or prospect for us, we are liable to consider this as now constituting “the answer” or “the truth,” subject of course to its surviving various if . . . then kinds

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 of tests. In Turbayne’s (1962) sense it is here that we are again in danger of being used by the metaphors we have just invented. The danger is in confusing our metaphors, or inventions, with reality itself. If we do this we are likely to tie ourselves down to our new interpretations, our new pretences, just as we were tied down to the old ones. But if we get this far in the use of as if thinking and acting, then an alarming alternative to accepting the “new view” as the “new reality” may open up. The alternative that may be borne in on us is that all our interpretations are subject to change, that we know nothing for sure and certain. An awareness of this gaping possibility whereby we and the world seem nothing but a patina of make-believe, pretence, and fictions can be tremendously threatening. It may undermine one’s whole sense of the solidity of existence and the world. Thus, if you pursue the as if approach past the first few stages, you may suddenly be aware that you are headed for nowhere and nothingness, groundless subjectivity where everything might be this or might be that, but nothing is 92 Metaphors

known for sure. No wonder most of us don’t get beyond this point very often, and no wonder Kelly’s innocent-looking invitation to think as if has not been taken up with very obvious alacrity. I suspect Kelly is inviting us to just this kind of experience of groundlessness, but not merely to this. The awareness and acceptance that all our present understandings are likely, in the course of time, to prove inadequate and subject to change does not mean that they are of no use to us. What it probably does mean is a change in our attitude towards what we presently take to be reality. It may mean that if we are to avoid both the dangers of being willing victims of our metaphors and finding ourselves awash in a frightening sea of shifting uncertainties, then we have to learn how to take the further steps involved in committing ourselves to our “best” interpretations or pretences. This means learning to entrust ourselves to and with those of our constructions which seem to offer us, in so far as we are able to judge, most scope and understanding, grasp and meaning in our continuing living. Kelly’s concern with “commitment” should perhaps thus be seen as a necessary accompaniment of his invitation to think “as if.” But again it makes life difficult in some respects since, in psychology at least, we have done little to elaborate how people learn to commit themselves to work out the possibilities of particular positions. Such work may prove necessary if Kelly’s invitation to make- believe is to be accepted. So it seems we may be letting ourselves in for a lot of problems if we take up this invitation. We may have to learn how to pretend, how to pretend to take our pretences seriously as we act through and in relation to them, how to entrust ourselves (the continuing mystery of whatever we may turn out to be) to the frail vehicle of some of our seeming “best” pretences. This life of passionate pretence and revision of pretences seems to be something like what Kelly is inviting us to consider. Such a view of life is at odds with our commonly accepted understanding of honesty and openness, direct dealing, and belief in the obvious. What it seems to imply is that in some sense our most “honest” searching for understanding of ourselves, others, or the world we live in may be possible only through willing “deception,” by making intentional “mistakes” and then by learning for a time to deceive ourselves about our deceptions by acting as if they were truth itself. Such a view would make Sartre’s (1956) discussions of “bad faith” and Fingarette’s (1969) lucid, penetrating account of self-deception of considerable importance in a psychological understanding of honesty and make-believe. They would similarly be directly relevant to a fuller appreciation of the nature of Kelly’s invitation to think “as if.”

Knowing as indwelling It is important to remember in all this that Kelly was concerned to outline a strategically

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 fruitful psychological approach to the understanding of man. His advocacy of venture was in relation to making something of the continuing mystery of man. But just as the explorer in the outside world will achieve some understanding of peoples he meets on his journeying if he lives among them for a time, so the personal venturer will only gain intimate knowledge of himself or others by getting close to them in some way, by getting under their skins. Kelly refers to this matter in his essay “Psychotherapy and the nature of man”(Kelly, 1969b). “With all respect to the psychologists who erect systems between themselves and their fellow men,” says Kelly, who considers himself as guilty as any in this matter, “the next step in this discussion is to point out that the closer one gets to persons the closer he gets to the nature of man. Granted, of course, that getting close to a person does not guarantee that you will understand him!”He goes on to point out that “if you never get close to him it is doubtful that you can ever develop a very perceptive scheme for understanding him.” Similarly, in “The psychology of the Metaphors for living 93

unknown”(Kelly, 1977), when he talks of the vital importance of involvement for psychological understanding, he reminds us that

if a man, say a psychologist, remains aloof from the human enterprise he sees only what is visible from the outside. But if he engages himself he will be caught up in the realities of human existence in ways that would never have occurred to him. He will breast the onrush of events. He will see, he will feel, he will be frightened, he will be exhilarated, and he will find himself feared, hated, and loved. Every resource at his disposal, not merely his cognitive and professional talents, will be challenged. So involved will he be that, in order to survive, he will have to cope with his circumstances inarticulately as well as verbally, primitively as well as intelligently, and he will have to pull himself together physically, socially, biologi- cally and spiritually.

Not only Kelly, but also the philosopher of science and former professor of physical chemistry, Michael Polanyi (1958), shows appreciation of the significance of involvement for knowing and understanding. He discusses it, though in the context of science, mathematics, the arts, and religion, and speaks of both “dwelling in” and “breaking out” from immersion in the subject matter of concern or contemplation. Both phases of the activity are vital if, in our earlier terms, we are to avoid being used by our metaphors, or if we are to avoid losing ourselves within only one phase of the creativity cycle. Kelly similarly recognizes the importance of “breaking out” in his insist- ence on the necessity of “reconstruction” in addition to involvement and commitment. However, I want to focus here on “indwelling” or “involvement,” since this aspect of experiencing is so often ignored in psychology. “A true understanding of science and mathematics,” suggests Polanyi, “includes the capacity for a contemplative experience of them.” He goes on to talk also of music and dramatic art and of how a teacher should enable a pupil “to surrender himself to the works of art.” “This is neither to observe nor to handle them, but to live in them.”Later he also claims that “the imper- sonality of intense contemplation consists in a complete participation of the person in that which he contemplates and not in his detachment from it, as would be the case in an ideally objective observation.” So here we find ourselves again confronted with suggestions which run counter to much that psychologists as scientists have been taught about the necessity of “detachment” and “separateness” between knower and known, inquirer and subject. Indeed, one of the tasks facing us in trying to understand Kelly’s psychology of personal constructs is that of learning to “indwell” or “live in” our experience of ourselves and others. One form of metaphor, namely, personification, may be specially useful here. Personification involves treating events, experiences, things, and feelings as if they

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 were persons with whom we are engaged in some kind of relationship. In using this metaphoric mode it is possible sometimes to “enter” and sense, as if from the “inside,” some of our experiences which may otherwise remain external to us, separated, little known, or threateningly unformulated. Thus, with appropriate preparations being given, it is possible, for example, to consider a concept like the “future” as if it were a “person” we are going forward to meet, and to find out thereby what kind of “person” this seems to be and what kind of “relationship” we have with each other. This is a sort-crossing task which can result in surprising insights for the person involved concerning his approach to life and the kinds of problems he is experiencing, even if inarticulately, in his everyday affairs. Or again, a heavy smoker may be invited to think of “cigarettes” as if they are a “person” he is meeting many times each day of his life, and this improbable task can sometimes lend to insights and personal knowledge which might not be forthcoming with more direct questioning. 94 Metaphors

Consider a little more fully one example of a stammerer who is losing his stammer but still sticks on some words sometimes, and he is asking if he may just have to accept that he will always have a slight speech impediment. After some practice with as if thinking, he was able to consider his residual stammer as if it were a “person” he was having some dealings with. Through this strange cross-sorting he sensed that it was as if his irregular speech was a small boy who had been shut away in some kind of room or prison for a very long time. This small boy, it seemed, was determined to make sure that something of him was heard, even though he was not given any direct voice in the man’s affairs. To the stammerer it seemed that this small boy felt things very deeply, though the man himself had always tried to keep his feelings in check throughout his life. So the small boy made his presence felt through disruption of the man’s speech in all kinds of situations where the man was attempting to gloss over or hide his feelings or deny their existence. Both the stammerer himself and I, listening to him, felt we were here beginning to deal with something of importance in his life, even though it arose in this curious form of make-believe. Examples of this kind of use of personification can readily be multiplied, but in the few examples I’ve mentioned the people involved did seem able to “get into” some aspects of their “problems” in ways which might not have been possible had they remained at the level of “obvious reality.” One way of understanding how this might be is to suppose that each of us as persons is able to respond to all sorts of circumstances to the extent of our capacities as persons. We are not necessarily limited in our ways of dealing with events by the more restricted characteristics or capacities which we ascribe to the things or events themselves. I can respond to all kinds of circumstances to the limits of my capacities, whatever they may be, and am not restricted in my ways of responding by the limits of the thing I am dealing with. Thus unless we can provide ourselves with the opportunity and means of understanding our relationship with events in some ways which are as broad and complex as we are ourselves, we may sometimes not be able to make any adequate sense of our apparently “irrational” concerns. The ploy of “getting into” our experiencing of some events by the use of personification can be elaborated further. Consider the stammerer a little more. He is able to “describe” the “little boy” who has been kept a “prisoner” for many years, but he can then be invited for a time to be this boy rather than his more elaborate usual self. This step is likely not to be possible without preparation, since an unusual mode of experiencing is being suggested. The person is being invited to shift the centre of his awareness so that he is thinking and feeling as if from within the “boy” rather than from his customary perspective. In this particular instance our patient begins a bit fal- teringly, softly, to talk of feeling neglected and ignored, of feeling tremendous rage at times at never being allowed a voice or say in affairs. He says how he feels very deeply

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 about things, both passionate hatred as well as love. He feels that his feelings of love and affection especially are ignored and neglected by the person of the stammerer, who seems frightened of them and shuts him away. He goes on haltingly to say that he has always loved this person of whom he is a part and can never leave him until these feelings of his can be both recognized and expressed by the person as an integral part of himself. In the course of all this the stammerer is near to tears, he is clearly very moved by what he finds himself saying and feeling. He feels he has been involved in exploring something which he had scarcely been aware of and had no way of recognizing or approaching. Whether he is then able to make further use of this kind of experience is another matter. I am merely offering it here as an instance of indwelling, as living in and from an aspect of his experience which in a way didn’t even exist before the metaphor of personification was introduced as a vehicle for elaborating his present awareness. Metaphors for living 95

Personification is only one way of extending our skills in “living in” aspects of our experience, but it seems to be especially relevant in considering personal construct psychology. This seems so because at the centre of Kelly’s thinking is the person, and personal experience is a fulcrum around which the powers of the individual are exercised. Even though the person may be a continuing and living mystery, greater understanding of the mystery may be gained by entering and using the mystery itself, the form of the personal, rather than escaping into premature objectivity. In personification we are attempting to penetrate a mystery by using the form of mystery itself. Even though we are not yet able to articulate many of the powers and possibilities of the personal, we need to develop means whereby we can use these powers to make available to us knowledge and understandings which do not present themselves in logical, prepacked forms. Unless we can make better ways of dwelling in and breaking out from aspects of our awareness, we may fail to make what we might of many of our personal possibilities. It might seem to some that the use of personification is a very retrograde step in psychology. It may seem like bringing back homunculi of many kinds, as well as witches, hobgoblins, and gremlins, when so much effort has been exerted in replacing such as these by “objectivity” and reason. However, this would be to miss the point. I wonder if we had to rush into preemptive objectivity because we knew no other way of com- bating the tyranny of metaphors which we mistook for direct claims about reality. Pro- vided that we persist in remembering that we are engaged in forming and discovering something of our reality through interpretation and reinterpretation, then we may be able to tread safely on dangerous ground where previously we were liable to be sucked down into believing that our own fictions were direct accounts of naked reality. Reali- ties of a psychological kind are involved, but these can be constructed only as we live in and break out from our metaphoric self-deceptions. The use of personification can extend far beyond the account I have given here. It is often readily possible for people to formulate aspects of their awareness as if different subselves were involved. In this way a person may be enabled to enter and elaborate his experience of himself and his relations both within himself and between himself and other aspects of the world in a manner which is quite different from the “external” view the person may generally have of himself. Such “selves” may be explored as varying and changing “communities,” each person being himself a “community of selves” rather than a single unit closed like a clam. In identifying and living in different “selves” or groupings of selves within his own personal “community,” a person may gain a living sense of the kind of “population” he includes, the manner of organization or controls exercised by aspects of himself, the sorts of fragmentations and separations which are operating, the kinds of rules of entry or exclusion which he may be enforcing in different aspects of his “community” without his general awareness. By means such

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 as this a new perspective on many aspects of personal construct theory may also be obtained through the provision of some means of living in and from aspects of awareness, rather than taking only an external view of something abstractly considered as a personal construct system. From within, it may come to seem more like a living community, where aspects of structure and organization may be explored as living “realities” rather than treated as rather distant abstractions. All this is, however, only a way of saying that “indwelling” seems to be a metaphor which we may need to explore if we are to “get into” aspects of personal construct psychology and if we are to gain more intimate knowledge of the person who is at the centre of Kelly’s concerns. Again the unusualness of this line of thought and action within general psychology may be another factor contributing to the difficulty we seem to have in making much that is new of the kind of psychology which Kelly seems to be inviting us towards. 96 Metaphors

A psychology of living So far, through the use of a number of metaphors, I’ve tried to indicate that there are aspects of Kelly’s thinking which are unusual in the context of the mainstream of present-day psychology. Kelly seems to be inviting us to involve ourselves in inquiries of personal concern and thus to put ourselves at risk. Inquiry, in the sense in which Kelly uses the term, may involve the person fully and challenge all his talents and resources. Indeed, for Kelly it seems that “inquiry” is a metaphor for “living” itself rather than some separated activity whereby we detach ourselves from life and observe from a distance. Thus the metaphors for aspects of inquiry which I have already been considering – “making” and “making up,” “venture,” and “indwelling”– can similarly be treated as metaphors for aspects of living. Kelly suggests that by participating fully in and committing himself to such activities, a person may make something of his life and take responsibility for what he is making. It is perhaps this reflexive perspective of inquiry as living and living as inquiry which makes personal construct psychology particularly awkward to handle alongside many other theories and approaches in psychology where “living” and “behaviour” and “psychological inquiry” seem to be treated as separate kinds of events. Kelly’s psychology of ways of living has a number of emphases which distinguish it from, for example, a psychology of behaviour. It concerns itself with the span of a person’s life and the sense he is making within that span, rather than only or mainly with the outcomes of specific experiments. It involves us in dealing with things which matter to the persons concerned and not just or mainly with those issues which matter to professional inquirers. It focuses on the ways in which any person struggles to make something of himself and his circumstances through his actions rather than on his observed movements, traits, or traumas. It involves understanding of the person from his point of view and is intimately concerned with personal meanings, values, and commitments rather than detached observations and neutralized matters of “general” concern. However, in pursuing the metaphor of living as inquiry, Kelly condenses many of his beliefs about both into the enigmatic wording of the fundamental postulate. Here I want to draw attention to two issues concerning living which are important for our understanding of Kelly’s views on the nature of psychological inquiry. I want to suggest that Kelly was trying to develop a psychology of questions and a psychology of means and manners in personal action. Consider first his interest in questions. Apart from talking of human life both for the individual and for mankind through the centuries as a quest, Kelly often talks as if “behaviour” is our way of posing questions in the world. Questions are means and frameworks by and through which we anticipate events in forms bounded by our

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 present understandings. With questions we reach out for and attempt to clothe with some familiarity the unknowns which lie ahead of us or outside our range of present comprehension. In personal construct psychology our attention is repeatedly directed to the questions a person may be asking through his whole living and not just in his words. It is assumed that little understanding has been attained of any person unless the fundamental questions which permeate and sustain his living have been recognized. Indeed, so central is a concern with questions in personal construct psychology that their importance for living and therefore also for inquiry is affirmed within the fundamental postulate of the theory. To highlight this particular meaning, Kelly’s wording can be paraphrased to read, “A person’s processes are psychologically channelized by his questions.” Questions and ways of asking questions set the limits on the kinds of answers which can be achieved. Something of the importance of questions can be noted by stepping Metaphors for living 97

outside personal construct theory for a moment. In her Philosophy in a New Key, which also stresses the importance of metaphor in human affairs, Susanne Langer (1951) clarified this point well in her beautifully illuminating overview of changes in philosophic thought through the centuries. She suggests that every age has its own philosophical preoccupations, and each age is distinguished by its “mode of handling problems, rather than what they are about.” This mode of handling any problem “begins with its first expression as a question. The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it – right or wrong – may be given.” In philosophy (as perhaps in individual lives), major movement comes not from piling up detailed answers to old questions, but eventually from rejecting the question in the old form and formulating different questions. Any particular way of formulating a question carries within its structure the hidden assumptions, which are more or less consciously taken as being truths. Professor Langer points out that though these assumptions are not usually stated by a person, “they find expression in the form of his questions.” She goes on to say that “a question is really an ambiguous proposition; the answer is its determination. There can be only a certain number of alternatives that will complete its sense. In this way the intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.” She further suggests,

In philosophy this disposition of problems is the most important thing that a school, a movement, or an age contributes. This is the “genius” of a great philosophy; in its light, systems arise and rule and die. Therefore a philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problems than by its solution of them. Its answers establish an edifice of facts; but its questions make the frame in which its picture of facts is plotted. They make more than the frame; they give the angle of perspective, the palette, the style in which the picture is drawn – everything except the subject. In our questions lie our principles of analysis, and our answers may express whatever those principles are able to yield. (p. 16)

Everything said here by Susanne Langer could refer also to the individual person and could be taken as a brilliant account of the importance of questions, which Kelly clearly recognized within the fundamental statement of his theory. For Kelly, an intimate concern with questions both precedes and provides the context of all answers, and answers for Kelly are “good” answers only in so far as they raise even better questions. Kelly’s interest seems always to be aroused more by a man’s questions than by his answers, and as we have already noted, he even suggested that we adopt an “invitational mood” in our language so that we might more readily approach our

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 most familiar as well as other more unusual “answers” with a posture of expectancy, as questions rather than firm conclusions. Kelly perhaps chose “the scientist” as an explicit metaphor for man because in our time the scientist is par excellence the person who has elaborated the art of asking penetrating questions in ways which have provided answers and further questions of astonishing beauty and power. Kelly’s interest was not to turn everyone into formal scientists, but rather to draw attention to the essential human function of questioning and to encourage the elaboration of ways of clarifying and pursuing our questions which are most often acted rather than stated, implicit in our assumptions and deeds rather than consciously recognized and pursued in full awareness. Kelly was of course also very much concerned with “getting answers” and with how people get answers for themselves. It was because of this that he stressed the direct relevance of the principles in the experimental methods of science for the posing and 98 Metaphors

answering of questions in everyday life. However, for Kelly, questions are primary, since their form contains already the kinds of answers that can thereafter be attained. A psychology which emphasizes questions rather than answers inevitably raises problems for which no ready-made solutions are available. As yet no systematic means have been developed whereby we can readily identify, clarify, formulate, and reformulate the questions which may sustain, guide, or perplex our lives. Few books on psychological methodology give more than cursory attention to elaborating means whereby we may formulate and explore central questions clothed in our everyday concerns. Kelly also seems to be proposing a psychology of means and manners in inquiry and living. He clearly recognized that the means we employ rank in importance with the ends for which we strive. In his “Psychology of the optimal man”(1967), Kelly states this concern plainly in discussing an example of a man who spends his time making as much money as he can. “What does it mean?”Kelly asks:

Perhaps he is trying to insure his family against every conceivable hazard, or himself from the haunting fear of disclosing his own insufficiency. Whatever it is, his money making makes sense only in the light of his anticipations. But it also works the other way around. He may end up his life as a wealthy grasping man, himself his family’s worst hazard and, as a person, revealed as insufficient in more ways than when he started. The goal he so faithfully pursued turns out to be defined, not only by his ambition, but also by what he did to fulfill it. So for us all! The events we attempt to anticipate may turn out to be contaminated by what we did to anticipate them. (p. 248, italics added)

In other words the means we adopt and the manner in which we pursue our ends and give effect to our means modify the ends we aim for and themselves constitute a part of the ends we do achieve. The stress Kelly wanted to place on means is again expressed directly in the fundamental postulate of his theory where he states that “A person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events.” In psychology generally there has been only a limited recognition that the ways in which we do things may significantly alter what we are doing. In accepting the conventional procedures of “scientific” inquiry within psychology we have adopted a set of stylistic rules whereby the investigator keeps himself anonymous, impassive, detached, and uncommunicative as regards his own beliefs, expectations, hopes, and intentions. Through this style of interaction with his subjects the experimenter hopes that his inquiry will thereby remain “pure” and avoid the “contamination” which would result if any other manner or style were adopted. Only relatively recently have severe doubts

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 been cast on the general validity of this “correct” manner of approach in interpersonal inquiries. In psychology, just as in everyday life, it is unlikely that we can be most open, informative, and cooperative with someone who insists on being distant, impassive, uninvolved, impersonal, or uncommunicative. In psychological inquiry, as in ordinary life, the ways in which we pursue our concerns, the means we adopt, and the manners these involve modify the meanings we aim to create. Something of this same kind of concern is highlighted by Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1968) when they outline five tentative axioms of human communication. In their second axiom they suggest that “every communication has a content and a relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a meta- communication.” That is, when we say or do anything we do so in some particular style or manner, and this manner modifies or qualifies what we are saying or doing. The resulting communication is then a mixture of the apparent message and the form Metaphors for living 99

or way in which it is constructed and conveyed. What Kelly also seems to be saying is that in all human inquiry, in all our actions in living, this intermingling of “content” and “manner” is always present. Just as the “tenor” and “vehicle” of a metaphor interact to create new meaning, so also in all our actions, what we do is transformed by how we do it. While our means, manners, and ends may not always be easily distinguished, they have to be recognized and explored in Kelly’s psychology of living and in any psychological inquiry into living. We noted earlier that the classical view of language and metaphor assumed that language (and perhaps also our other ways of making sense of events) and the “objective” world were quite separate things and also that the manner in which something is said (or otherwise acted out) does not significantly alter what is said (or done). In psychology we seem to have been working on something like these assumptions in inquiries into personal and interpersonal functioning. However, rather than talking of “Plain Style” which allows the “Truth” to appear unadorned by the seductions and fripperies of metaphoric extravagance, we have held instead to an equally puritanical “scientific method.” By this standard means we have tried to cut through the “con- ceits” and “embellishments” of personal manners and styles in order to gain access to the “plain,” “basic” laws of our human nature. Kelly, it seems to me, is challenging this whole network of assumptions and is suggesting that in psychology we have to come to terms with the kind of alternative view which in earlier times, through the romantic movement, transformed our understanding of the role of metaphor in language and language in relation to our understanding of reality. He seems to be suggesting that our “ways of anticipating events” include both the means which we use and the ends towards which we strive and that both of these are in their turn intertwined with and transformed by the manner in which we both ask our questions and construct our answers. Both in living and in inquiry within psychology, we need then to develop ways in which we may be more sensitive to and respectful towards the diverse ways in which we and others fashion the styles of the realities within which we live. This again would seem to be no easy task, since only the very broadest terms within which such a psychology could be pursued have yet been conceived. But it is not enough to recognize that the style or manner through which we deal with present events is an integral part of what they mean to us and what we intend in relation to them. Matters of manner and style seem also to be important in relation to the ends we seek as well as the means through which we seek them. When we probe into the unknown across the frontier of what we presently take to be the case, we are likely to find ourselves searching for “forms” in the haze of anxiety; we have to struggle to give “shape” to our inarticulate searchings; we must formulate some coherent understanding where there is at present only the uncertainty of shapeless possibility.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 How do we know in which direction to move, which possible patterns to trust and which to avoid? Might it not be that we are to some degree guided by our own sense of “good form,” of “rightness of line,” of “acceptable style”? Do we not structure our searchings through the “filters” of our own personal sense of “good style” or “good manners” or “good form”? While one person in relation to his questions may accept as adequate some explanation, solution, theory, or fact, another may well dismiss these as hopelessly inadequate in relation to the values which inform the pattern or style through which he reaches forward to give satisfying personal form to the “shape of things to come.” The meanings we make and search for are shaped by the ways in which we anticipate events, and these ways include our questions and the manner in which we pursue them. In advocating a psychology of means and manners Kelly seems thus to be directing our attention to the need to develop far greater psychological understanding of the questions 100 Metaphors

we are asking in our everyday actions, and the manner, style, and form through which we create our relations with the world. He seems to be inviting us to consider the possibility that we need not necessarily be constrained or limited by a harsh, frequently ugly, and “puritanical” pursuit of the “plain, unvarnished facts.” But once again, it seems to me, his invitation is no easy one to accept, since it suggests the need for fundamental reformula- tions in our approach to personal and interpersonal inquiry in psychology, and through the reflexivity which Kelly suggests between inquiry and living, in our manners of living too. We do not at present have in psychology many ways in which to identify and explore our questions, or represent and reform the manner in which we realize our intentions, or determine what we mean through the forms of our living. AND SO . . . I have tried to take another look at some aspects of personal construct psychology in the hope of removing some of the patina of familiarity which is already tend- ing to hide the freshness of perspective George Kelly was struggling to create. My interpretations are inevitably a mixture of Kelly and me, but I hope something of the spirit of Kelly’s questions and constructive answers has been illustrated even though I have bypassed most of the formal structure of his theory. Hopefully, also some of the abstract unfamiliarity of his thought can be made a little more accessible through the use of metaphor and the tradition of inquiry involved therewith. Kelly seems to me to be offering us the outlines of a psychology of living which could considerably extend our understanding of psychological inquiry. Through making and make-believe, venture and involvement, he suggests that the mystery of man may be given new meanings. The alternative kind of psychology he indicates seems primarily concerned with our ways, manner, or style of reaching out towards ends through which we anticipate the realization of our intentions, which are themselves formed and reformed in the questions we pose in all our actions. It was Saint Augustine who said, “Let us know in order to search,” and this same spirit informs Kelly’s view of living as inquiry, as quest. These insidious questions and gently insistent invitations to risk committing yourself to inquiries of personal significance are unlikely to find very ready acceptance in psychology, since they raise too many disquieting possibilities and too much threat to settled ways. Martin Foss (1949), in writing on Symbol and Metaphor in Human Experience, expressed something of what I feel about many of the “solutions” in terms of means and ends which we seem to have accepted in the mainstream of our modern psychology when he noted:

The favorite answer of an age, however, is often one in which only a minimum of problems is preserved and which has been promoted to its place as favorite because it seems to render superfluous all further questioning. It closes all doors,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 blocks all ways, and just because of this permits the agreeable feeling that the goal has been reached and that rest is granted. (p. 1)

I hope it is apparent from what has been said here that Kelly has presented us with very many problems and numerous questions which we can scarcely yet ask, far less answer. Perhaps for some he has opened too many doors, which let in the cold draught of untamed reality and offered too many paths which lead into the unknown. If we are to avoid reducing his questions to technical clichés, we may find it useful to enrich our perspective on these concerns through a greater “command of metaphor.” In so doing we may also build a bridge between the “arts” and the “sciences” and create a psychology which respects and offers some enrichment to the manner of our living and the form of our inquiry. Metaphors for living 101

Notes 1 Reprinted from Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 1976: Personal Construct Psychology, edited by A.W. Landfield, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1977 by the University of Nebraska Press. 2 I wish to express my gratitude to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Wassenaar, Netherlands. Much of the thought and reading which formed the basis for this essay was undertaken during a fellowship year at the institute in 1971–72. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CHAPTER 8

THE COMMUNITY OF SELF1

‘What is man that we should be mindful of him?’2 Questions concerning the nature of man are presumably as old as thought itself and we don’t seem to be much closer to any definitive answers now than at any time in the past. In fact you could even argue that we are getting further away from any widespread agreement as to the kinds of account that should be given of ourselves and others. At least since Darwin shattered the myth, so dear to so many, of man being but a little lower than the angels by rudely re-allocating him to a position only a little higher than the apes, there has been an increasing ferment of reappraisal. In this, science has become the new certainty for many, the new protector behind which we can shelter from the chill air of confusion. It was, after all, through scientific modes of thought and inquiry that the old theologically supported view of our world as the centre of everything was replaced by the seemingly humiliating alternative of it being merely an outlying speck in an outlying galaxy. It has been through scientific modes of inquiry that the atom has been split and many of the biological mysteries of life amazingly unravelled. Through science also we have developed means of destruction of diverse kinds and vast proportions. Such have been the advances of science in our time, and the sophisticated power made possible through the specialized techniques of scientists, that many people seem to have lost any firm psychological or personal footing in the world. So many older beliefs have been shattered by advances in science that many seem to have given up the very business of asking any serious questions about the nature of man in a personal rather than in a narrower biological or physical sense. Not only is it now difficult to know what sorts of questions it would be considered meaningful to ask, but we are

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 also frightened of hazarding answers to questions we do ask, in case, as so often in the course of this century, both our assumptions and conclusions are swept out from under our feet yet again by developments in science.

Psychology and the reduction of man Within psychology, as in the other social sciences, versions of the old questions are asked but many of the answers proffered have done little to increase our self respect. Blows to long standing beliefs about the rationality and freedom of man have come within psychology as well as from the discoveries in the physical sciences. Freud shocked his generation by insisting that sexuality permeated childhood as well as adult life and by implying the shallowness of much human knowledge and the limitations of personal control in creatures driven largely by unconscious desires. The community of self 103

The early Behaviourists opposed much of what Freud said and seemed to challenge further man’s sense of his own worth. Within the strict Behaviourist view all talk of self or experiences, hopes or purposes, thoughts or reasons disappeared at a stroke. He became little more than a mindless slot-machine proffering his limited responses as the appropriate tokens were inserted. Since then this simple view has been stretched and modified as thinking, imagination, plans and purposes, meanings and even hidden meanings have been ‘re-discovered’. Yet even now on the powerful, fundamentalist wing of the Behaviourist Reformation, Skinner and his followers seem to project a compelling picture of man as an empty organism jerkily dancing to the barrel-organ of his circumstances. It is not just science, but also technology which has flourished during this century. Perhaps it is because of this growth in the power, complexity, variety and availability of machines that so many of our models for explaining man have been ‘mechanical’ or ‘electronic’. Thus man, who only recently found himself relegated to a more lowly position of one among the animals, has increasingly found that both animal and human behaviour are being accounted for by analogy with machines. For many practical purposes this, no doubt, makes a lot of sense. Machines have the great appeal in a mysterious and shifting world of being gratifyingly concrete, finite, comprehensible and largely explicable in terms of mathematics, mechanics, physics, electronics or other branches of the more developed sciences. But by reducing man to manageable proportions in this way we should not be too surprised to find many people who then treat themselves and others as machine-like and who believe that issues of human change and development can best be solved by ‘behavioural engineering’. Another important area of psychological concern has been the study of ‘Individual Differences’, but here too, we have often unwittingly impoverished our understanding of personal functioning. We have repeatedly used large groups of anonymous subjects as a basis for making supposedly general statements about human personality and abilities. The persistent use of this kind of approach resulted in any individual person seeming virtually meaningless when considered in their own right. The individual person became little more than a ‘deviant’ of greater or lesser degree on ‘dimensions’ he or she had no part in creating and whose relationship to each other in the original standardization sample might well have little or no bearing on his or her own ways of ordering events. A further way in which methods of psychological inquiry have incidentally blunted our appreciation of the nature of human functioning is found in the widespread reliance on questionnaires as a means of communication. Almost unnoticed we have come to accept a crude over-simplification of what constitutes communication between people. So often we seem to have studied individual differences by weeding out first of all whatever questions seem clearly to be understood in different ways

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 by different people. Thereafter, the hope seems to be that the simplified remaining questions will be understood similarly by pretty well everyone. Here it seems to be assumed that if we perform some equivalent of shouting loudly and clearly enough our one-syllable questions, then subjects, like foreigners, will almost certainly get the message. Firm limits are usually placed on the kinds of answers which are allowed and some investigators go further still in diminishing the personal significance of whatever the subject may squeeze into his YES, NO or SOMETIMES replies. This final reduction comes when the experimenter claims that, after all, it doesn’t necessarily matter if people do interpret the questions, the context, or the task differently. It doesn’t matter if they do mean different things in choosing any particular answer. The psychologist after all needn’t care what meaning or sense the subject may have been trying to convey. All that is important after all is the behavioural outcome, the pattern of marks on the paper. 104 Metaphors

Alternatives All this should not be interpreted as an attack on science in general or psychology in particular. My concern has been only to suggest that in both direct and indirect ways our conceptions of ourselves and others have been, for many at least, radically changed. Older beliefs about the dignity of man and his special status in the order of things have been unsettled in many different ways. Former certainties and securities have repeatedly been discredited or become untenable. Many people, both within psychology and more widely in society, are searching for alternatives with considerable confusion and anxiety. One of the confusing things within psychology, as many people question the ade- quacy of the ‘old giants’ of psychoanalysis and behaviourism, is that so many alternatives seem to be forthcoming. In what has been called ‘humanistic’ psychology there has been in recent years a vigorous outpouring of alternative approaches, theories and methods in education and therapy. The unhappiness felt by many in being constrained by too few choices seems to have given way to an unhappiness about having too many choices. As we thus try to escape from the old frameworks which formed and directed our understanding, we may well find it is not particular, concrete courses of alternative action that we need, but alternative ‘ground’ on which to stand, different assumptions about the ‘reality’ of ourselves and others, a different kind of basis for belief and action. All this is obviously a very tall order, but indicates none-the-less the area of my present concerns in this essay. In undertaking such a task as this, my only hope is that by attempting to spell out a few possibilities, it will become clearer to both myself and others what their limitations as well as their uses may be. In this way it may be just a little easier to do better next time round.

Metaphors of man When we attempt to understand anything unfamiliar, unknown, mysterious or beyond our present comprehension we seem to resort to the use of metaphor. Consider for instance how we make some sense of our ‘feelings’. We talk of feeling ‘heavy’ or ‘light’, ‘high’ or ‘low’, ‘stirred up’ or ‘settled’, ‘soft’ or ‘hard’, ‘warm’ or ‘cold’, ‘bright’ or ‘dull’, ‘stretched’ or ‘cramped’, ‘falling apart’ or ‘coming together’, and so on. Here as elsewhere, we reach for some understanding through the use of more familiar structures laid over the less familiar events which are engaging us. The process of metaphor seems to be an activity whereby we carry across some frame of reference, which is usually applied in some other sphere of action, to view, grasp, explore, open up, structure or otherwise re-appraise the events to which we are now attending. In the process of this act of transference we act as if the events which we more conventionally ascribe to one

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 set of categories really belonged to another. Through this procedure we see things afresh and make it possible to approach events differently. We entertain alternative possibilities for further action by willingly making a kind of ‘mistake’ whereby something, or some set of events, are treated as if, in various important respects, they were something quite different. This kind of willing self-deception seems to pervade all our experiencing and can be considered quite fundamental in our understanding of and action in relation to the events through which we constitute our experience of the world. In this light we can readily begin to see all claims about man as a ‘developed ape’ or a ‘fallen angel’, a ‘mechanical toy’ or a ‘super-computer’, as a ‘mindless epiphenomenon of a mindless universe’ or an ‘open system in the larger ecosystem of the planet earth’, not as bald assertions about what man is, but as metaphors for exploring the endless mystery of what man may yet make of himself. The danger here comes, as it has so often come in the past, when we mistake metaphor – our own The community of self 105

acts of intentional mistake making in the service of understanding – for truth itself, or when we confuse, as we so often do, an invitation to inquiry with dogmatic assertion. Not one of the metaphors of man which has yet been elaborated can provide a full account of his nature nor need we assume that any single or any combination of metaphors in the future will do so either. This does not mean that any particular ‘pretence’ about the nature of man is trivial or futile. Quite the reverse seems true. It is only as we construct and involve ourselves in further imaginative possibilities concerning what man may be that we will both reveal and create for ourselves further visions of what we may become. By the same token if we commit ourselves to and lose ourselves in metaphors of man which are too small for us we may gain a certain kind of security for a time, but are likely to pay a high price in despair, confusion and the denial of freedom we can ill afford to lose. I have introduced elsewhere the notion that metaphor, or rather the activities which we label as ‘metaphor’, should be considered a far more important process than has been customarily recognized within psychology (Mair 1977b) and will not repeat that argument here. It is, however, within this frame of reference, viewing man as one who explores and creates the realities of his existence in the world, realizing new possibilities through the process of metaphor, that I want to turn now to consider a particular metaphor of man. My intention is not primarily to advocate the use of this particular metaphor, or to suggest that it is universally relevant, but to open up one alternative viewpoint which may offer us glimpses of others beyond it. More especially, I want to elaborate this particular metaphor as a perspective from which to approach aspects of George Kelly’s psychology of personal constructs (Kelly 1955) since I believe that many of the possibilities in Kelly’s writings are almost unreachable at present because of the route by which we approach them.

Self as community The cultures of the West have been for hundreds of years oriented towards individuality. Within Christianity generally, and especially since the Reformation, there has been great emphasis on individual responsibility and the notion that each man must work out his own salvation. One of the corollaries of this general belief in the essential separateness and privacy of individuals seems, however, to be that if you are not somebody then you are a nobody. People who are not recognized or known by us as ‘individuals’ tend to be clustered as undifferentiated ‘units’ called ‘workers’ or ‘foreigners’ or ‘subjects’. Thus we find ourselves with a psychology which stresses ‘individual differences’, but paradoxically it might seem, loses sight of individuals almost completely in amorphous clumps of interchangeable ‘subjects’. We find ourselves also with an ‘external’ bias in our psychology whereby our ‘respect’ for the individual has all but ruled out the pos-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 sibility of developing public understanding of our ‘private’ concerns. Whatever John Donne may have said, we do seem often to experience ourselves and others as ‘islands’, even though we also know that we are not complete unto ourselves. Though there are many arguments to the contrary, we do often experience and construct our selves as fortresses set up against a hostile world and assume, on the psychological plane, that the Englishman’s home is still his castle. Instead of viewing any particular person as an individual unit, I would like you to entertain, for the time being, the ‘mistaken’ view of any person as if he or she were a ‘community of selves’. This is clearly an invitation to make-believe, though I hope it will become apparent that we seem to construct our ‘realities’ through just this kind of willing self-deception. It is not, though, a specially novel idea since this kind of notion has repeatedly been used through the centuries and, as I’ll indicate later, is still widely used in many forms. My belief, however, is that by exploring the notion of ‘self as 106 Metaphors

community’ explicitly as an exercise in metaphor we may be able to grasp some of its possibilities for understanding and action. Perhaps it is easiest to introduce the idea of ‘self as if a community of selves’ by referring to the smallest form of community, namely a community of two persons. Most of us have probably, at some time, found ourselves talking or acting as if we were two people rather than one. We talk sometimes of being in ‘two minds’ about something, part of you wanting to do one thing and part wanting to do something else. Quite often we hear people talk of having to ‘battle’ with themselves, as if one aspect of themselves was in conflict with another. Often we pass this sort of thing over as only a form of expression. However, the explicit invitation to consider oneself, for the moment, as two people rather than one-self can make it possible for us to pay attention first to one of the ‘people’ and then to the ‘other’ one. In this activity the person can be encouraged to ignore, for the moment, one of the ‘selves’ and ‘get inside’ the other. From this vantage point of being ‘inside’ one side or party in the dispute, rather than only being vaguely aware of the two sides as an ‘outsider’ from some separate vantage point, it is sometimes possible for the person to sense more fully some of the hopes and fears, values and plans, concerns and confusions of this ‘other person’. Thereafter, a similar activity of ‘entering’ and ‘experiencing from’ the other ‘party’ to the dispute can be undertaken. Not infrequently a graphically clear impression is obtained of the incompatibilities and suspicions, assumptions and tactics of the two ‘selves’ in relation to each other and between them and ‘members’ of other ‘communities’. The notion of oneself as a ‘community of selves’ can readily be elaborated further by some people to incorporate three, four or any other number of ‘selves’. Some of these ‘selves’ will be found to persist and others may be more transitory, some will be ‘isolates’ and others will work in ‘teams’, some will ‘appear’ in many circumstances and others only on a few special kinds of occasions, some will be ‘more powerful’ and others will give way to them. Sometimes, people can offer and use quite elaborated accounts of their ‘community of selves’. Since these show up some of the features of this metaphor in action, a few examples may be helpful.

Examples of personal ‘communities’ 1. John John had difficulties in stopping smoking and asked for some help. As we discussed the matter, it seemed that many personal issues were tied up in this presenting problem. He seemed to be trying to cope with confusing aspects of his own experience in his dealings with both himself and others. I outlined the idea of the person as a ‘community of selves’ and suggested that he might find it useful to think of his various and contra-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 dictory feelings, desires and concerns as if these were different ‘selves’ constituting his personal ‘community’. He responded immediately by saying that in these terms he could see exactly what he had been doing all these years. In terms of the way in which he interpreted the idea of ‘community’ (and different people make different and sometimes changing interpretations here), he now ‘recognized’ that the most powerful person in his ‘community’ was his ‘Foreign Secretary’. His ‘Foreign Secretary’ spent very little time ‘at home’. Instead of this, he was continuously travelling around amongst other ‘communities’ – other people – trying to help and impress them at all times and at almost any cost to his own ‘community’. He was forever trying to make friendly overtures to other ‘communities’, dispensing ‘foreign aid’ frequently and whenever he was asked for it. The ‘Foreign Secretary’ couldn’t and wouldn’t refuse any request for aid since he was very concerned to be needed by every other ‘community’. Over the years he had therefore repeatedly committed his ‘home producers’ to all sorts of gigantic production The community of self 107

tasks to meet this endless foreign demand and had never checked that they were able or willing to undertake all these ‘export’ orders. Thus while the ‘Foreign Secretary’ went around impressing other communities with his ‘mother bountiful’ act his whole ‘home community’ lived in a state of strain, uneasiness and often down-trodden resentment. The pervasive feeling within the ‘home community’ was of living with the persistent uncertainty as to whether they would be able to meet the heavy demands being made on them to provide goods and services for all kinds of other ‘communities’. When he returned a week later, he brought with him a typewritten page on which he had outlined what he felt to be some important aspects of his personal ‘community’ which he called ‘The Home Team’. Britain, at the time, was engaging in discussions as to whether or not it should enter the ‘Common Market’ of the E.E.C. and John had used some of the concerns involved in this in giving an account of his own ‘community’. In this document he identified a number of groups and individuals within his ‘community’ and discussed their various activities, concerns, limitations and strengths. He considered major ‘groups’ which he called ‘the Wise Ones’ and ‘the Common Mar- keteers’, and discussed the positions and policies of both ‘the Home Secretary’ and ‘the Chancellor of the Exchequer’. Along with this written summary he indicated verbally that he had sacked the old ‘Home Secretary’ who had been too weak and replaced him by a more powerful one. Simultaneously, the powers of the ‘Foreign Secretary’ had been curbed. Now all requests for help from other ‘communities’ had to be discussed ‘in Cabinet’ rather than being passed on automatically because the ‘Foreign Secretary’ wanted it so. John went on to say that for the first time that week he had been able to say ‘No’ to some request for help because he was already heavily committed. Previously, he was sure, he would have felt obliged to agree without delay to add this to his list of obligations. This time he had felt able to pause and think about it ‘in Cabinet’, and then to act with that authority. He had also found himself, for the first time that he could remember, feeling happy to be by himself for periods of time. In the past he had always felt too lonely if he were alone for even a few minutes but now he had experienced something quite different. How, he asked, could he possibly feel lonely with so many different ‘people’ and ‘groups’ emerging in his ‘community’? Along with all this, John also found that, almost without effort, his cigarette smoking had been reduced to only a few each day and in a number of other ways, his time and his life felt more ‘his own’ to do with as he chose. John’s immediate use of the metaphor of ‘community’ was striking, although it provided only a means for tackling some of his problems over time and was certainly not a ready-made solution to them. It seemed to provide him with the beginning of a personal ‘language’ within which to conceive and begin to control aspects of his ways of dealing with himself, others and the world.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 2. David David also found the metaphor useful as he worked, over a long period of time, to resolve his problems which centred around his stammer. He came from Northern Ire- land and had stammered since childhood. Like John, he also chose a ‘political’ interpretation of the metaphor of ‘community’. Within these terms, David talked as if he were composed of a number of political factions. Initially he outlined three groups. The ‘Hard Liners’ were aggressive, right wing, impatient, bigoted, unforgiving and cynical. The ‘Soft Liners’ were concerned in all circumstances and on all occasions with finding and taking the easy way out, with appeasement, maintaining the status quo and with letting sleeping dogs lie. Between these was the ‘Middle Group’ who were less clear cut but were more or less reasonable, without very definite opinions, liable to be swayed in one direction or another and fairly down to earth. 108 Metaphors

These groups, and especially the ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft Liners’, were engaged with each other and the world in continuing confusions of warfare and resistance, appeasement and withdrawal. The ‘Speaker’ in David’s ‘Parliament’ had the unenviable job of trying to present to the world the common view of the whole ‘community’, but in most circumstances any single view-point was simply non-existent. Instead of this, strident claims and counter-claims were the order of things. Indeed, as David explored his ‘community’ further, he became aware of even more extreme ‘Hard’ and extreme ‘Soft- Line’ groups. Between these extremes there were huge and persistent differences in policy and values. The ‘Hard Liners’ didn’t seem to know the meaning of ideas like withdrawal or surrender and would fight anywhere and on the slightest provocation. The ‘Soft Liners’, on the other hand, had an equally intense policy of appeasement, of peace at any price. If presented with the choice of speaking or not, the ‘Hard Liners’ would absolutely insist on being heard, while the ‘Soft Liners’ would prefer not to speak at all. David felt that the ‘Soft Liners’ sometimes retreated into total silence to keep out of trouble, but were then dragged out by the even greater anger of the ‘Hard Liners’ to assert some kind of position. On being asked if these two sides ever ‘spoke’ to each other, David instantly replied that neither of these extremist wings ever wanted to admit that the other side was there at all. The ‘Hard Liners’ took the attitude that they should never acknowledge that there was a stammer, while the ‘Soft Line’ side was ready and eager to admit to stammering in everything and anything if necessary. David indicated that the side which had been strongest for most of his life was the one which claimed that he didn’t stammer at all, but he pointed out that a friend of his, who also stammered, had chosen the opposite position and become a virtual recluse. As David made further use of the metaphor of ‘community’ he became aware that the ‘Middle Group’ was more like a loose collection of various individuals and groups. He began to talk about occasional experiences of feeling and acting in a more relaxed manner. By personifying this experience he began to work out some of the implications and possible involvements of this more ‘Relaxed and Uncommitted Group’, which occupied some of the ‘middle ground’ in his political spectrum. This group did not seem to be aligned with any other factions and because of this, David thought they might well frighten a number of other ‘people’ in his ‘community’ who were alarmed by anyone who did not take definite stands in relation to conventional issues. About this time, David noticed that occasionally he was speaking without any fore- thought and in a relaxed manner. He found, though, that when he did this, he stammered a lot. He felt that as soon as this more ‘relaxed’ and ‘spontaneous’ involvement in speech occurred there was a reactive feeling of shock and anxiety within the different ‘factions’ in his ‘community’, with the various committed ‘groups’ taking over firm control again. David indicated that he wanted this ‘Relaxed Group’ to wander all

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 through his ‘community’ to spread their kind of feeling and concerns. In pursuing this, David felt that this ‘Relaxed Group’ might belong to a further grouping which he referred to as a ‘Friendly Group’. These seemed as though they might be ‘people’ who would be friendly with everyone, who cared about others and were charitable in their actions and thoughts. David felt that this, gradually emerging, ‘Friendly Group’, might well be more prepared than any one else to tolerate the views of others in the ‘community’, even though they might personally disagree with them. It was through this clustering of ‘relaxed’, ‘friendly’ and ‘free-and-easy’ groups that he began to develop more active involvement with people at work and home. The ‘battle’ for control within his ‘community’ was however, fought long and hard. The ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft Liners’ only very gradually released control as other more ‘flexible’ and ‘warm’ groupings spread their influence and tested their competence in coping with the everyday affairs of living. The community of self 109

3. Peter A third example may be useful to indicate that other interpretations of ‘community’ than a ‘political’ one can be used and also to indicate that people with the ‘same’ problem (in this instance, stammering), are not necessarily very similar to each other. Rather than talk in terms of ‘Parliament’ or ‘Political Factions’, Peter developed his interpretation of the ‘community’ theme in terms of a ‘Troupe of Players’. His ‘Troupe’ seemed to him to be guided by a ‘Council’ whose general task was to keep performers and performances ‘in balance’. The main controller of day to day activities was the ‘Producer’. His job was to take responsibility for what was happening ‘on stage’ at any moment in time. This ‘Producer’ seemed to like being fairly easy going and often tried to be on equal terms with the various players. This could be pleasant when no great demands were being made on the ‘Troupe’, but even then, in the lax atmosphere, there was a recurrent tendency for arrangements to come unstuck. Jobs didn’t seem to get done and gradually the ‘players’ would find themselves in dire trouble, without sufficient cohesion or organization to pull things together. At times like this the ‘Producer’ would be forced out of his laissez-faire approach and become an autocratic martinet. He would clamp down and impose a kind of martial law or a state of emergency. Sharp orders would then be given and would have to be obeyed and many of the ‘Actors’ who couldn’t or wouldn’t respond to this kind of treatment were banned or suspended till the emergency was over. Among the ‘Actors’, Peter initially outlined the following. There was the ‘Conversa- tionalist’ who loved company for company’s sake, enjoyed the give and take of ideas and was never happier than when relaxing in good company. Balancing and off-setting him was the ‘Businessman’ who was very practical and down to earth. He always had to be getting somewhere and had to be engaged in organized, constructive action or he became very frustrated. For long periods of time these two could occupy complementary ‘parts’, each taking spells of being advanced ‘on stage’. However, there seemed always to be a tendency for one or the other to ‘hog the limelight’ when he got into it. This repeatedly led to trouble and ‘performances’ would get completely out of ‘balance’ in one direction or the other. Then there was the ‘Country Bumpkin’ who had no mind for detail or finesse, but saw the main points in anything and would just batter on with things in crude but purposeful ways around these main issues. He was balanced by the ‘Metropolitan Smooth Man’ who, in contrast, was very much concerned with detail. He considered that refusal to master detail was just a sign of laziness and stupidity. Then there was the ‘Adventurer’ who used to love going on long cycle runs, enjoyed climbing mountains, and relished any challenge like facing a new job or a new situation in which the slate was wiped clear and he was free to act in accordance with circumstances. He had

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 been a prominent ‘character’ for a long time in the past, but was less apparent in the present. Along with him came the ‘Sentimental Lover’ who was all emotion, sentiment and tenderness. He expressed himself a lot in the context of Peter’s marriage. It seemed he could come ‘onstage’ there but otherwise was kept in the background. He was very fond of animals and children and was generally very loving and warm. Another very important ‘Actor’ in the ‘Troupe’ was the ‘Dreamer’. He hated being tied down to anything but was quite a pleasant character. He always wanted to take part in things which were relaxing and pleasing. He loved the countryside and nature generally. If he ever found himself being tied-down or having to be highly organized, he just withdrew. Thus, when the ‘Producer’ was in an autocratic phase, the ‘Dreamer’ was always one of the first to disappear. However, it was apparently the ‘Dreamer’ who was especially fertile in the production of ideas and quite a number of the things which the other characters made capital from came from him in the first place. 110 Metaphors

Peter commented on how ‘real’ these characters seemed to him, but as we continued it became apparent that very little communication existed between the different ‘players’. The ‘Producer’ seemed to be the only ‘person’ with continuing responsibility for getting the show on the road. The other ‘players’ seemed to be very much ‘character- part actors’ whose only concern was with their particular ‘act’. There seemed to be little sense of shared responsibility or interlacing of interests among the various ‘actors’. When the ‘Producer’ let things slide into a free-and-easy democracy, ‘everyone’ seemed just to slouch around and let things slide further. This in turn would lead to yet another dictatorial purge by the ‘Producer’ who would precipitately grab back all the authority he had recently relinquished in order to get some sort of adequate ‘show’ underway. Peter found that his stammering became particularly bad during the phase of laissez- faire disintegration when the ‘Producer’ relinquished firm control and the ‘players’ lost any sense of direction and order. As part of a programme of ‘community development’, Peter undertook a number of tasks to try to increase understanding and communication between important ‘members’ of his ‘Troupe’. The intention here was to try to foster more sharing of responsibility among the different ‘members’ so that less crisis-control action would be necessary by the ‘Producer’. In the course of this, Peter tried to ‘get inside’ each of the main ‘characters’ in turn to experience ‘from the inside’ something of their personal concerns. On the basis of this we then tried to develop more exchange between the ‘players’ and more participation in each other’s actions. The long term concern here was to find and extend common areas of interest and ways of working together so that they need not continue in virtual isolation, relying on the peremptory commands of an often harrassed ‘Producer’.

Some comments on ‘community’ Hopefully, these examples will convey something of the ways in which the metaphor of ‘self as community’ can be interpreted in use. This metaphor is, of course, not a solution in itself for most problems in living, nor does it make sense or seem usable by everyone. Even those who do make something out of it for their personal purposes find that they can sometimes make more use of it than at other times and seem to be more ‘ready’ for it in some circumstances than others. However, my intention here is neither to expound its practical application nor to provide a full critique of its limitations. I want only to indicate some of the more obvious features of this ‘image of man’. The ‘community’ metaphor seems to provide, for some people at least, a flexible framework within which to represent and express many aspects of their experience in relation to themselves and others. It seems to provide a means by which they can ‘open out’ and sense something of the pattern of their engagements which were previously ‘cramped-in’ and ‘hard to grasp’. One of the advantages of this framework is that it

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 offers to everyone something already familiar in many different forms. Everyone has experiences of living in some sorts of communities whether they be family, neighbour- hood groups, recreational clubs or teams, work situations in shops or factories or offices, larger scale communities like nations with governments and modes of administration, or even constellations of nations in the world at large. There is endless variety and complexity available here and also simplicity, since useful elaboration can be done within a ‘community’ composed of two ‘people’. No esoteric language need be involved, although any amount of it is available should it be desired. For some people there is also something very ‘obvious’ about the metaphor when used in relation to their own experience, while at the same time its use often provides surprisingly fresh perspectives. Clearly the metaphor lays emphasis not on isolation but on inter-relationships. Within this view, methods and kinds of communication and ways in which communication is restricted or prevented are clearly important. Possibilities for increased communication The community of self 111

can here be made available between our ‘selves’ and between ‘members’ in different ‘communities’. In all this, one potentially fertile feature of the metaphor is that it invites us to explore our personal experiencing in the world in the same sorts of terms which we normally reserve for social events. Of course, any metaphor can be pressed too far and result in meaningless confusion, but it may be that some useful developments could arise from understanding personal functioning in terms normally restricted to social psychology and sociology and conversely from exploring aspects of social structure, group pressures and prejudices, organizational control and change and such like within the ‘laboratory’ of personal ‘communities of selves’. We can see, indeed, that in using this metaphor, a psychological understanding of any person could make use of concepts and methods drawn from many other disciplines. In giving some account of personal ‘communities’ we may find useful concepts already available in the fields of politics, group processes, diplomacy, debate, propaganda, industrial organization, labour relations, international trade, law, theatre, literature, arts and sciences Anything which we find useful in conceiving or guiding action in the various communities within which we live, including the ‘ecological community’ wherein man lives in relation to other aspects of his environment, may be potentially relevant by metaphoric transference in giving some account of our ‘communities of selves’.

‘Community’ in context As I have already indicated, the general idea of viewing a person as some kind of organized grouping of sub-selves or tendencies is by no means new. From ancient times man has been understood in these sorts of terms and certainly since Plato outlined a conception of the individual by analogy with a city state, such notions have been widely used in Western Civilization. Within psychology there have been and still are many examples of this mode of interpretation. Ellenberger (1970) indicates that McDougall talked of the rivalry and struggle which could develop between different ‘tendencies’ in the person and that Janet and Binet both viewed hysteria as a form of dual personality. Freud’s writing is also relevant here and among many other similarities, his notions of ‘ego’, ‘id’ and ‘superego’ could be viewed as a kind of ‘community’ structure. Post Freudian theorists, as Brown (1961) points out, developed even more clearly various conceptions of the ‘social’ nature of self. Sullivan, for instance, regarded the self as being made up from the reflected appraisals of others and the roles which are prescribed by society. He recognized not only what goes on between two or more real people as constituents of self-functioning, but also suggested that there may be ‘fantastic personifications’ or ideal figures with whom an individual ‘interacts’. Somewhat similar ideas on the social nature of self are expressed also by Erich Fromm and David Riesman. These writers suggested that basic types of character and personality change as society develops, and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 in particular, as the methods of social control change in society so also the kinds of rules, government and controls operating within individuals change to reflect these. Jung (see Storr 1973) made a great deal of use of personification and postulated various kinds of enduring archetype ‘figures’ in personal experience. Others like Mela- nie Klein, Fairbairn, and Guntrip (see Guntrip 1971) structure some of their concerns in Object Relations Theory in terms which can readily be interpreted in relation to the metaphor of ‘community’. Many in the ‘humanistic’ movement show similar concerns. Eric Berne (1961) outlines a kind of ‘community’ in talking in terms of the three figure-roles of ‘parent’, ‘adult’ and ‘child’ as well as many elaborations on this. R.D. Laing talks of the ‘divided self’ (1961) and the ‘politics of experience’ (1967) and thus indicates both a concern with the multiplicity of self-structure and the relevance of ‘politics’ to the understanding of selves in relationship. Perls et al. (1951) can also be seen as functioning in terms of ideas about ‘community’ in our experiencing. Many 112 Metaphors

of their techniques could well be viewed as ways in which we can identify and bring together aspects of our experience whose intimate relationship with the remainder we have denied, lost sight of or as yet failed to realize. This list of instances could be almost endlessly extended and any reader will, I’m sure, be able to add many important names which have been omitted here. And, of course, it is not only in psychology that this sort of idea finds expression. The ‘social behaviourist’ and philosopher, G.H. Mead (1964) discussed consciousness as an inte- riorization of the actions of others and thought of reasoning as a form of symbolic ‘discussion’ between several individuals. He outlined a form of ‘minimal community’ when discussing his concepts of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘self’. More recently, the sociologist, Peter Berger (1963) has made considerable use of the metaphor of life as ‘drama’ and talked of the many ‘roles’ or ‘parts’ which we play within ourselves and with each other. More recently still, the social psychologist, John Rowan (1976) provided a most explicit account of the range of ‘sub-selves’ which may constitute our experience. He outlines a viewpoint which is very close to the notion of ‘community’ in his explorations of what he calls ‘internal societies’. Such ideas have also played a large part in religious and philosophic thinking through the centuries. Herbert Fingarette, for instance, discusses both the pervasive issue of self-deception (1969) and also relationships between psycho-analytic ideas and Eastern religious/philosophic views (1963) in terms which are entirely compatible with the notion of ‘community’. In The Self in Transformation he provides an engrossing discussion of what could be regarded as our ‘other lives’ or ‘other selves’. ‘We become responsible agents’, he suggests, ‘when we can face the moral continuity of the familiar, conscious self with other strange, “alien” psychic entities – our “other selves”.’ He goes on to say that ‘we should perhaps speak of an “identity” with other selves rather than a “continuity”. For we must accept responsibility for the “acts” of these other selves; we must see these acts as ours.’ He proceeds further to claim that we here deal with, ‘a special, startling kind of intimacy’. ‘It calls me’, he argues, ‘to recognize that I suffer, whether I will or no, for the deeds of those other selves. It is an intimacy which, when encountered, makes it self-evident that I must assume responsibility for the acts and thoughts of those other persons as if they were I.’ Many of the writers mentioned here have made implicit rather than explicit use of some version of ‘self as community’. Before passing on, therefore, to consider aspects of Personal Construct Theory in relation to ‘community’ it may be worth mentioning three ways in which my use of ‘community’ differs, to some degree, from other and earlier uses. First of all, my intention is to keep persistently in mind that in considering ourselves or others in terms of ‘community’ or ‘mechanism’ or anything else, we are engaging in the use of metaphor. We are thereby exploring and giving form to the mysteries of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 our existence through the pretence that we are indeed formed in ways made familiar in other contexts. So often we become the victims of our own fictions and begin to treat them as conclusions rather than inventions. The metaphor of the ‘community of selves’ is not an assertion but one invitation among many possible invitations, to personal inquiry. Second, in the explicit use of the notion of ‘community of selves’ there seems to be greater flexibility and less pre-judgement and Procrustean fitting of angular people into the round holes of psychological theory. Within the scope of the ‘community’ metaphor comes a wide variety of kinds of communities which may be interpreted in many different ways and used in different manners by different people. Finally, I have chosen the metaphor of ‘community’ rather than notions like ‘society’, ‘state’ or ‘groups’ because it seems to be a more discriminating idea. As John Macmurray (1961) points out, every community is a society, but not every society is The community of self 113

a community. The notion of ‘community’ points to the possible importance of further notions like ‘communication’ and ‘communion’ and ‘fellowship’. Although these extra dimensions will not be followed further here, they reflect guiding principles, assumptions or values which I wish to incorporate in developing an alternative ‘image of man’.

Personal Construct Theory and ‘community’ I want now to turn to Personal Construct Theory and consider it for a little in the context of the metaphor of ‘self as community’. George Kelly wrote his Psychology of Personal Constructs when academic psychology in America was dominated by Behav- iourism and an emphasis on operational definitions, objectivity and a conviction that psychological as well as physical phenomena were amenable to precise measurement. People, like myself, brought up in the weary maturity of this tradition sensed something liberatingly different in Kelly’s writing. Yet somehow only a little of what we inarticulately sensed as specially innovative in Kelly’s perspective has yet been realized in practical or theoretical developments. Why should this be? Obviously many different kinds of explanations could be given, but I want to pursue only one possibility here. It seems likely that Personal Construct Theory, like anything else, may look somewhat different depending on the direction from which you approach it. Many people, I suspect, while recognizing something importantly different in Kelly’s writing, have tended to lose sight of these differences as they have assimilated only those of his concerns which fitted most comfortably into the perspective from which they approached his work. Thus in Britain, for instance, with its scientific traditions of objective measurement and statistics, it is not surprising that it was the appeal- ing formality of the repertory grid which caught our interest and channelled much of our attention. Much of Kelly’s philosophy and theory remained hard to handle and difficult to integrate with issues already familiar in our empirical scientific approach. My hope is that by laying aside, for the moment, whatever implicit direction of approach we may be employing, and explicitly viewing Personal Construct Theory from the perspective of metaphor, and in particular the metaphor of the ‘self as community’, some aspects of Kelly’s concerns may stand out more clearly and some possibilities appear which might otherwise remain obscure. Any adequate understanding of Kelly’s theory would require much more than the use of one metaphor, but I hope that this narrowing of attention will be of some use none the less.

Persons and constructs George Kelly emphasized the central importance of ‘the person’ in his psychological approach and stressed this in the wording of his Fundamental Postulate and in nearly

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 all the corollaries. He indicated also that for his purposes ‘the person is not an object which is temporarily in a moving state but is himself a form of motion’. Yet, in spite of this stress on the central, living, and perpetually moving mystery of the person in Kelly’s writing, it seems to me that most writers have focused primarily on ‘constructs’. The active ‘person’ seems often to disappear and all attention is directed to the ‘constructs’, or at least the verbal labels which may indicate to some degree some of the person’s ‘network of pathways’. In this process we may readily fall into the ‘from-to’ trap indicated by Polanyi (1958). We are likely to attend ‘from’ the person ‘to’ his constructs and thereby to hold on to what we have thus objectified as being the central substance of our concerns. In this way the mystery of the person may once again drop out of our awareness because it is hard to fit into the objectifying traditions in much of psychology. Approaching Personal Construct Theory from the direction of the metaphor of ‘self as community’ there seems little likelihood of overlooking the centrality of ‘the person’. 114 Metaphors

Here the person is considered to live through many ‘selves’, with each or any construct, so to speak, being potentially the centre of an alternative ‘self’. Thus, instead of seeing ‘constructs’ as objectified and impersonal dimensions which the person looks at and manipulates from some central ‘control-tower’, they become guises and forms through and in which the person can participate actively in experiencing and exploring his world from numerous perspectives. He may also gain some sense of the ‘motion’ Kelly talks of as he ‘enters’ and ‘leaves’ and moves between the different ‘persons’ in his ‘community’. He may thus, to some degree at least, gain a sense of experiencing and having available to him different lives, different feelings, different choices, different ways of being in the world.

Thinking and action Kelly also explicitly claimed he was offering a theory of human action, rather than a ‘behavioural’ or a ‘cognitive’ theory. Even so, most of the research work concerning Personal Constructs seems to be more concerned with thinking and thought disorder, conceptual structure and conceptual change. The charge which is often brought against Construct Theory of being too ‘intellectual’ or ‘cerebral’ seems not without foundation if much of the available research in the area is considered. But again we may have been unwittingly induced into assimilating Kelly’s ideas into familiar and respectable categories related to ‘concept formation’ and ‘thinking’ already sanctioned within scientific psychology. If we approach Kelly’s ideas through the metaphor of ‘self as a community of selves’ or the person as if composed of a number of different ‘persons’, we can, in considering any individual, gain a remarkably powerful sense of actions, interactions, transactions and counteractions. The weaving complexities of action by different ‘people’ in relation to many and differing commitments and concerns can convey a sense of patterned movement like that between players and teams on a football field as the ball is passed and held, gained and lost. The metaphor, indeed, tends not to convey a sense of people ‘thinking’ but rather persistently engaged in purposive action in pursuit of agreed or unacknowledged ends. Thus, when Kelly talks of a person’s processes being psychologically channellized by the ways in which he anticipates events, these ‘ways’ would here be considered as ‘procedures’ for going about the business of living rather than as ‘conceptual labels’ to pin on to passing events. Within ‘personal communities’ it is also, sometimes, easy to note how different ‘members’ can oppose each other, interfere with, alarm, invalidate and otherwise hinder the acting out and bringing to fruition of any particular line of concern. If, as Kelly suggests in his Experience Corollary, a person’s system changes as he successively construes the replication of events, he is likely not to change if he persists in the same aborted, inappropriate or hostile procedures of acting in relation to events. Within the ‘community

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 of self’ metaphor it is easy to see that ‘experiencing in full cycle’ for any ‘person’ may be important at times, if the person as a whole is to be able to change. So also it is possible to recognize how the same person may be both hostile and aggressive, in Kelly’s sense, at the same time, as different ‘members’ of his ‘community’ pursue different policies in living. Indeed, each of Kelly’s constructions concerning transition – fear, anxiety, guilt, as well as aggression, hostility, the c-p-c cycle and the creativity cycle – can be illumi- natingly explored as interpersonal strategies in action between ‘members’ of ‘personal communities’.

Organization and control Within communities of different kinds it is easy to see that organization will be needed if any coherent action is to be undertaken. Procedures have to be developed whereby The community of self 115

choices can be made in adopting any particular lines of action among the many possibilities which may be canvassed. Very many different ways have been developed by different kinds of communities for arriving at choices and for putting such choices into practice. This whole complex of activities is normally considered under headings like, government, administration, policy making, planning, politics, law, business and such like. In considering ‘personal communities’ ideas from any or all of these areas of discourse may also be appropriate at times and any individual may be considered as one complex, organized, self-controlling ‘community’ in complex relations with many other interdependent, but uniquely organized ‘communities’ in the wider world. Then we come to Personal Construct Theory and find that Kelly clearly recognizes in his Organization Corollary that for any person it is important to order his constructions in ways which will establish priorities in action. In the Range Corollary he recognizes that any particular construct has limits to its range of usefulness, just as any person in a community has limited functions. His Choice Corollary could be seen as highlighting an important principle in government action, and his whole range of ‘diagnostic constructs’ deal with different aspects of power (e.g. super-ordination, subordination, regnancy), government strategy (e.g. constriction, dilation, suspension, submergence), levels of administration (e.g. core, peripheral, incidental, comprehensive), and such like. In the Modulation Corollary, too, he seems to be dealing with the ways in which a person, like a community, maintains his identity by regulating the entry of new ideas or actions. In all this it may seem clear that Kelly is inviting us to explore not only the politics, but also the government and administration, diplomacy and negotiation, production and destruction of experience. But in fact almost nothing of this can be found in the research literature. Perhaps again, it may be because we have tended to approach Personal Construct Theory from a ‘scientific’, measurement-dominated and individual unit-counting conception of man, that we have tended to make only minimal use of many of Kelly’s constructions concerning organization and control. Generally we have rested content with studies of ‘structure’ depending almost entirely on the intercorrelations of repertory grid choices. Even though this has resulted in some interesting work, I suspect we are generally tied to ‘static’ and ‘group averaged’ notions of ‘conceptual structure’, ‘organizational consistency’ or ‘construct change’. We have, as yet, found no ways of representing the intricate, interweaving, functioning of individuals in action as they struggle to organize their affairs and control their destinies. The metaphor of ‘self as community’ may at least indicate some of the sorts of issues which seem to have concerned Kelly and which we have, so far, found elusive to the point of meaninglessness.

One and many

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 The metaphor of self as a ‘community of selves’ seems somewhat paradoxical though, in that it incorporates the ideas of unity and multiplicity at the same time, where each ‘part’ of a person needs a ‘whole’ person to account for it and not something less than the whole, as is so often assumed. This kind of idea may seem strange in relation to many of our approaches in psychology, but in fact the notion of many lives constituting one life, many selves constituting one self and at the same time, one self being constituted by many selves is a very ancient one. It is certainly not the kind of view likely to be entertained though, by those who believe that only reductionist and analytic approaches to explanation are scientifically respectable. However, it does seem to be the kind of view which is all but explicit in Personal Construct Theory. Within the Repertory Grid procedure it is not unusual to find that different ‘self’ constructs are used. Thus a person may distinguish between people in terms of them being like or unlike ‘Myself as I am’ or ‘Myself as I’d like to be’ or 116 Metaphors

‘Myself as I used to be’ or ‘Myself as I will be after treatment’. In this way it is recognized that any person may subsume different ‘selves’. So also in using any other particular construct dimension, since all constructs necessarily gain their meaning for a person in relationship with other constructions, then any construct could be taken as the central and defining feature of another ‘self’ or version of ‘self’. In this way any one person can be considered as being constituted of numerous alternative, but potential, ‘selves’. Not only is this so, but Kelly recognizes in his Fragmentation Corollary that a person can successively employ a variety of subsystems which seem unrelated and even incompatible. In this way one person can function as if he were more than one person, with each being out of touch and working at cross purposes with the others. In all of these ways Kelly seems to be recognizing many ‘persons’ or ‘potential persons’ within the one person, and one self as if permeating all a person’s ‘selves’. As we will see in the next section, this general view has important possible implications for our understanding of ourselves and others. It is also interesting to note that Kelly, while inviting us to view any man as if he were in some important respects like a scientist, at the same time outlines a view of personal functioning which shares much with forms of thought and explanation long recognized within different traditions of religious thought in both East and West. In this, as so often, Kelly entices us to break down old and often futile boundaries between disciplines in a search for more adequate understanding of human functioning.

Self and other Often, I think, when we consider the notion of ‘self’ or ‘our selves’ we vaguely suppose something contained more or less within the envelope of our skin, or spreading out around our bodies a little to lay claim to a patch of ‘personal space’. What we consider as ‘self’ tends to be identified as ‘inner’, while that which is distinguished as ‘other’ is likely to be classed as ‘outer’. In addition we tend to accept very often, that what is ‘external’ or ‘out there’ is more ‘real’, ‘substantial’, and ‘objective’ than what is ‘internal’ and therefore ‘subjective’. In using the metaphor of ‘self as community’, however, we find that distinctions between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ are blurred. We find ourselves oriented to a person’s relatively more private concerns in terms which are similar to those used in dealing with his more public activities in the world at large. So also, Kelly (1955) laid little emphasis on the necessity of distinguishing between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ in this context. ‘Persons’, he suggested, ‘anticipate both public events and private events. Some writers have considered it advisable to try to distinguish between “external” events and “internal” events. In our system there is no particular need for making this kind of distinction. Nor do we have to distinguish so sharply between stimulus and response,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 between the organism and his environment, or between the self and the not-self.’ What Kelly seems to be suggesting here is that while some people may find it useful to use distinctions like ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, there is nothing ‘given’ or fundamental about them. Particular people may use this kind of discrimination ‘for their convenience in anticipating events’ and in giving viable form to their own experiencing. Kelly invites us instead to consider ‘self’ as a personal construction rather than a geographic location. ‘The self is’, he suggests, ‘when considered in the appropriate context, a proper concept or construct. It refers to a group of events which are alike in a certain way and, in that same way, necessarily different from other events. The way in which the events are alike is the self.’ So Kelly is suggesting that ‘self’ can be considered as a personal construction and a means by which any person may order, sort or otherwise determine his undertakings in the world. Like any other construction it will be used differently by different people. The community of self 117

He is also saying that ‘self’ is, by itself, not the construction but only one side of an integral discrimination and grouping. Thus the personal construction is always something like ‘self/other’ or ‘self/not-self’. Events are sorted, approached, disposed of, undertaken or rejected as ‘self and not other’ or as ‘other and not-self’ or as being outside the range of convenience of either. Although we often talk in a casual way as if ‘self’ and ‘other’ were separate things, this is not the view taken by Kelly. What he suggests is that ‘other’ defines ‘self’ just as much as ‘self’ necessarily defines ‘other’. As the bounds of whatever we take to be ‘other’ or ‘not-self’ are moved, so also and by the same token, our understanding of ‘self’ is changed. In trying to cope with events, therefore, one person may group only a few events as ‘self’ set over against, and highlighted by, a vast range of ‘otherness’ in the world. Another person may construct himself as being at one with a great many of the events he experiences and distinguish himself from little. Both of these are considered by Kelly as personal undertakings in coping with events and not ‘givens’ in nature. In all this Kelly is emphasizing that ‘self’ is not something quite distinct from ‘other’, but that they rely on each other, they are intimately united in their separation, they symbiotically depend on and define each other. This kind of view, however, whereby ‘otherness’ is conceived as an integral and necessary side of ‘self’ is not easily grasped if we approach Kelly’s writing with our common, Western assumptions about the separateness, sovereign integrity and independence of individuals. But if we approach instead through the metaphor of ‘self as community’ we find we are immediately considering ourselves as composed of many other and possible ‘selves’. Each person may, from this perspective, be seen as being constituted of many ‘others’. Indeed within this context, ‘self/other’ distinctions are easily recognized as relative to the particular perspective from which personal events are experienced at any moment. Thus within his ‘community’ a person may be able, to some extent anyway, successively to ‘dwell in’ and then ‘break out’ from the various other ‘persons’ he has identified. From the perspective of each alternative ‘person’, what is taken as ‘self’ and what as ‘other’ will be different. In this way it would seem that even for one person, the construction of ‘self/other’ is not settled and done with, but may be hugely variable depending on the vantage points chosen within his ‘community’ or ‘system’ from which he constructs his experience and experiences his actions. In considering ‘self/other’ constructions in this way we are led on to a somewhat different understanding of ‘self’ and ‘other’. We can consider ‘self’ not as an ‘object’ of our attention, but as a ‘base’ from which we experience ‘other’ events. Thus each person can be considered as having as many ‘selves’ as he has vantage points from which to act. Each of these possible ‘selves’ can be identified only as the person somehow steps away from that base of experiencing and makes it ‘other’ in relation to yet a further vantage point. So we can see that ‘self’ in this sense is realized only as ‘other’, never as ‘self’. ‘Other’ is our vital means by which the mysterious possibilities of ‘self’

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 can be materialized. We can see then, that when we talk of ‘self’ as an object of our attention and assign characteristics of various kinds to it, in terms of ‘self/other’ perspectives we are more correctly referring to an ‘other’ to which we attend from some different and still undisclosed ‘self’ position. All this can be seen clearly in using the metaphor of ‘self as community’. While a person is acting from some particular ‘self’ base, that base cannot be identified and characterized by him since he is, by definition, acting from that base to other events or objects. He can, of course, move to another base and take another perspective on events, and from here the first base may, to some degree, be understood as ‘other’. Thus when a person tries to turn around, so to speak, and experience himself, he is engaged in treating himself as ‘other’ in relation to, and from the perspective of, a further and now unidentified base. When we talk about ‘self’ or ‘ourselves’ we are more correctly referring to something ‘other’ than the experiencing centre from which our ‘other selves’ are being characterized. 118 Metaphors

So it seems that the ‘self structure’ through and from which a person acts in relation to events at any time is realized only in others or as otherness. In this sense, we necessarily need ‘others’ to realize or become our ‘selves’. The construction of ‘other’ is the very means by which ‘self’ may be expressed, explored or otherwise grasped, and Kelly recognized this kind of essential ‘bipolarity’ in his basic definition of a construct. In the Repertory Grid type of procedure he also offers a means by which we can gain some sense of the experiencing, living person through the constructions he places on others. In Fixed Role therapy, he suggests that a person may make something more of him-‘self’ by becoming an-‘other’ for a time. In the extremely fertile, and still largely unexplored, notions of ‘role’ and ‘core role’, Kelly succinctly recognized that we elaborate ourselves in relation to others by making more of others in relation to ourselves. Yet, though all this is true, perhaps Kelly did not explicitly specify some of the important implications of ‘self/other’ perspectives which can more clearly be recognized in considering ‘self’ as a community of ‘other selves’. All this can be generalized further and all our constructions might usefully be considered as ‘from-to’ perspectives through which we live and give form to our worlds rather than as flat, bipolar ‘dumbbells’ floating about somewhere in psychological space. Thus any of us can be considered as having many different bases from which we continuously construct and reconstruct our acts of experiencing. Often, therefore, we may be acting from many different positions without recognizing this and so perhaps confuse ourselves by the apparent inconsistencies in our deeds and words. Often, too, we may insistently limit the number of perspectives from which we are prepared to experience events and so constrict ourselves within familiar, manageable, even if painfully narrow limits. The possibility of involving ourselves in others of the perspectives we may already have within our systems may indeed prove an unsettling experience. Our initial, routine and perhaps limited ways of defining ourselves over against the world may be shaken. We may sense a terrible loss of the familiar ground that we have long taken to be ourselves and experience the sense of dreaded change or loss of self which Kelly described as threat and guilt. But if we persist in entering and living through other perspectives we may also find ourselves involved with and understanding many ‘others’. Having ‘lost’ some of the narrow restrictions of our old selves we may begin to ‘find’ hints of a larger sense of self in others. As Kelly indicates, what we take to be ‘self’ and what ‘other’ is a ‘convenience’ constructed by us for our purposes and limited only by the ventures we are able or willing to undertake.

Making-up and scaling-down ourselves I started by suggesting that over the last century our sense of ourselves has been scaled down considerably till, in important areas of psychology, the individual human being

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 seemed insignificant and all but meaningless. I then suggested that we view all our attempts at giving an account of man’s nature as exercises in the elaboration of metaphors, rather than direct descriptions of how things really are. From this base I then offered and explored some of the implications of a particular metaphor. Through this perspective on oneself as if a ‘community of selves’, a flexible and elaborate sense can sometimes be gained of any person in action. This metaphor, in its turn, provided us with an alternative base from which to approach Personal Construct Theory afresh so that different aspects of Kelly’s concerns may, perhaps, become more available to us. At the same time, through both the metaphor of ‘self as community’ and Kelly’s notion of the bipolarity of construing a view which is different from our conventional understanding of ‘self’ and ‘other’ was developed. It seemed reasonable to suppose that we have available to us many ‘self/other’ perspectives through which to act and elaborate our understanding of ourselves and others. This fundamental concern shown by Kelly The community of self 119

with the essential bipolarity of construing is something we have as yet only partially understood. By recognizing that all our actions and experiencing is from some base to something else we highlight the need to recognize and learn to make something more of these integral and numerous ‘from-to’ perspectives through which we direct our living. We need to learn how to attend, when necessary, to the bases from which we and others act, as well as to the events towards which our or their actions are directed. In doing this, of course, we need also to remind ourselves that we are thereby now attending from some further and as yet undisclosed base which structures and limits, highlights and extends our possibilities in experiencing and making sense of our worlds. All this is, of course, to engage in a kind of ‘make believe’. I have tried here to make- up and illustrate an alternative view of ourselves and others. Alternative metaphors involve different ‘mistakes’ and provide us with different ‘perspectives’ on events. I have tried to show how a particular metaphoric view may enlarge, to some degree, our common understanding of self and others, but I am certainly not suggesting that this particular perspective will be universally appropriate or useful. Rather am I suggesting that we may need to acquire a greater ‘command of metaphor’. This in its turn requires that we learn also about the dangers involved therein since metaphor is ‘a dangerous game’ and ‘an inviting quagmire’. It is easy to reduce any metaphor to meaninglessness by pressing it too far or not far enough. It is very easy, too, to fall into the trap of reifying that which is metaphor, ‘pretence’ or ‘make believe’. Thus, for some people, it seems remarkably easy to slide into believing that a person really is composed of many other selves, and that we really are communities of various kinds. In all this, I hope it may be apparent that we have some choice in what we take ourselves to be. In talking of ‘taking’ ourselves to be this or that, or of ‘making’ more of ourselves, we are, of course, again engaged in metaphor. We have no means of really knowing whether we can ‘make’ anything of ourselves or can ‘take’ ourselves anywhere different from where we now ‘find’ ourselves. We have no ways of knowing other than by doing it, by acting in and experiencing through our own ‘best bets’. It is an invitation and not an assertion to say that we are engaged, at all times, in the active process of ‘making’ what we may individually and communally yet become.

Notes 1 First published as Mair, J.M.M. (1977) ‘The community of self’ in D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory, London and New York: Academic Press. Reprinted by permission of Ingrid Mair. 2 This is a variant of the question, ‘What is man that thou art mindful of him?’ which is asked in Psalm 8.4. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 This page intentionally left bank Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 PART IV

PSYCHOTHERAPY AND STORY TELLING Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 This page intentionally left bank Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CHAPTER 9

STORIES WE LIVE AND STORIES WE TELL

This didn’t start out as a political paper, but it seems to have gone that way. Perhaps this is how it should be when we again remember Don Bannister, whose life was in the midst of the politics of a new psychology, new ways of living and new ways of telling. I am going to be concerned with storytelling as an essential focus in psychology and psychotherapy. It is here, in the telling of our stories, that the politics of psychology both comes into focus and disappears from sight. It is here, too, that Don took such significant steps in his concern to tell the stories he lived. His move from the normal means of telling in psychology (though, for him, these were always infiltrated by inno- vation) to a different way of telling, through the form of the novel, has more psychological significance than may at first appear.

Telling our stories ‘Who or what am I?’, ‘What is going on?’, ‘What is happening between us?’, ‘How are we and our worlds changing?’ There seems to be a commonsense view in psychology and in everyday life that quite workable answers to such questions are not too difficult to come by. It seems generally to be supposed that the stories we live, and which live us, can relatively easily be told in adequate ways. But it is difficult to speak of who and where we are. It is difficult (and perhaps impossible) to tell it like it is for us. We are constituted by the conventions of our times and cannot easily turn to recognize and question what they are or who and where we may be, in terms which can edge us towards awareness of these conventions themselves.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 We are rooted in the competences and blindnesses of our individual and cultural histories and are enactments of stories we did not choose. Whatever sense of freedom we have is at least partly because of hostages to fortune long ago traded for our obedient behaviour. We have learned to give answers to the kinds of questions we have been elbowed towards asking. We have not learned so much about questioning our questions, doubt- ing our capacities to doubt.

Telling ‘clinical’ stories I will first look briefly at some of the implications of the designation ‘clinical’ in the context of ‘clinical’ psychology and ‘clinical’ reports, telling ‘clinical’ stories. In this I’m feeling for the half hidden messages in the ‘psychiatric’ modes of telling the stories of 124 Psychotherapy and story telling

lives which still influence us in other disciplines because we grew from that root and have to live in an organizational world already dominated by medical/psychiatric rules.

x A ‘clinical’ telling is almost always an authoritative telling, a telling which claims authority. It is told by someone whose views are given some institutional support in the professional and organizational structures which legitimate certain tellers and take credibility away from others. x Being a performative act within a complexly structured ‘medical’ context, a ‘clinical’ telling carries with it various implications of this context. It is to be clean (aseptic, even), uninvolved, objectifying (seeing the person being dealt with in a reduced professional set of meanings), with the expectation of expert judgement being handed down. x A ‘clinical’ telling is often historical (within a limited definition of ‘history’ which claims belief on the basis of largely unchecked tellings by one or more interested parties). This historical perspective contributes to the claim of authority being made, suggesting some degree of inevitability in whatever outcome is identified. x A ‘clinical’ telling is the means by which a life in society is converted into a ‘text’ of a particular, professionalized kind. The person in the world is converted to a narrative within a file and this narrative has to serve a variety of functions. These include being the authorized statement of the person’s life in relation to the service involved. x A ‘clinical’ telling usually removes a life from the terms of its own understanding. It involves a ‘taking away’ to another realm of discourse which can create fear and mystery and from which the ordinary person is excluded by a set of messages implying difficulty, superiority of understanding and knowledge, access to powers beyond the ordinary. x A ‘clinical’ telling involves the translation of a life into the possession of a secret and self defending society. It is a means by which people are both ‘elevated’ to the position of being ‘known’ and ‘located’, while at the same time being ‘disqualified’ and more or less subtly ‘disinherited’. x A ‘clinical’ telling is a defensive telling. It achieves this in a number of ways (e.g. by translation into technical language, by sharing the telling mainly with professionals, by defining the subject matter as already less than a person to be trusted by the fact that the ‘clinical’ telling is necessary, by proposing a perspective on the person as the end result of forces which have shaped an outcome in ‘illness’, not of choice, which might indicate equality of authority). x A ‘clinical’ telling reduces the person while seeming to include him or her. Quotations are sometimes used which ‘pin guilt by selection’. Significances are attached to events which are not laid open to question and correction. Not infre-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 quently, ‘clinical’ tellings contain blatant inaccuracies which contribute to a pervading rhetoric of disrespect. x A ‘clinical’ telling is an assertion of power and contributes directly to the continued incapacitating of its subject of attention. Once a telling has been typed it becomes a hidden indictment for an unknown length of time. x A ‘clinical’ telling is an unstable telling which seeks to stabilize itself by the exclusion of much of the relevant dialogue which might undermine it.

But surely it is possible for the stories we tell of the stories we live to give a different status to other voices, other worlds, than the regimented requirements of the ‘clinical’ establishment. Was it Roland Barthes who spoke of the ‘tyranny of lucidity’ which dictates so much of what and how we tell? Even when we know little of what we are up to or Stories we live and stories we tell 125

involved within, we feel obliged to offer a coherent and clarifying tale. We do not generally allow ourselves or others to reflect our dislocations, the shifting and indeter- minate sands of ourselves/our worlds. If we could change our styles of writing and telling might it be that we would thereby contribute to changing our ways of understanding and feeling our being in the world? The pervasive conventions of how we are professionally allowed to tell are problems as well as our commonly accepted solutions. The styles of telling we allow and disallow may constitute the forms of life we are able to entertain.

Stories I live and stories I tell It is within such constraints as these which define ‘clinical’ telling that I am held. I feel trapped in stories I do not want to live. I am shaped towards many kinds of silence by the weight of a dominant cultural history which continues to speak with more authority than I feel it deserves. Through all this I long for something I do not clearly know and reach for whatever it might be, again and again. I hurt and strain and most often lose touch, settling again into everyday neglect. But then the longing comes again. For years I have been unhappy about the limited ways in which I seem able to speak of the kinds of things I’m involved with in psychotherapeutic conversations. The kind of reporting I do is fairly ‘standard’ in relation to the standards of those immediately around me, but it feels unsatisfying and unsatisfactory. I do not want to be part of the conceptual and conventional coat-tails of the medical and psychiatric establishment in what I do or how I tell my tales. Even now I can say this without knowing explicitly what I’m objecting to or what I’m seeking. I seem to be held and moved along within a now firmly conventional way of speaking of what I know and seek to know, and cannot easily peer out of its con- taining blindness to see where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m not doing and where I might better go. Frequently even my present generalized sense of this issue falls apart or floats away as the pressures for action of many kinds make a more immediate claim on me.

Crisis and care In addition to this personal feeling of being held prisoner within professional conventions of telling, we are, I believe, at a time of quite marked threat to the kinds of psychology many of us value. I don’t think it is too much to say that we are in a period of ‘make or break’. The odds are heavily stacked against us as demand builds up for an increasingly commercialized, degraded and tightened psychology of instant answers.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 For many with a concern for an attentive and careful psychotherapeutic psychology these are increasingly hard times. With the rampant demands that everything be quantified, packaged for appearance and produced for mass consumption, all proper concerns for qualities of feeling and relationship seem almost incomprehensible to many who manage our ‘caring’ services. We have to ask ourselves seriously if ‘understanding’ of self or others still matters or has become irrelevant when quantity and ‘efficiency’, marketing and menace increasingly hold sway. Is ‘understanding’ any longer relevant in lives shaped by forces we neither recognize nor own and where the chancy dispensations of changing power leave but erratic remnants in their wake. Perhaps ‘understanding’ is now a hopeless aim, but we can still try to clarify some of what is sometimes going on. In earlier times we could hide in the coat-tails of a liberal humanist tradition which was under threat but continued to provide an unformulated home from which adventurers 126 Psychotherapy and story telling

went forth to various ends. While the looser, gentler, more speculative, sensitive, feelingful and imaginative predilections of some of us were no more representative of the ethos of the times, we were able to survive, more or less, without having to formulate ourselves too clearly. There was still enough of a cradle of implicit recognition to allow us some space to weave our webs and spin our kinds of yarns. Things are different now and will become more difficult still. The rug has already been pulled out from under us. With the behaviourist/empiricist/reductionist enthusiasm of psychological science now being elevated to a national (and international) passion we are left struggling, gasping for air, fish out of water. If the kind of care we value is to be maintained, continuingly explored and developed further, we are going to have to care for ourselves and what we are about more decisively than before. If we do not care in practical and sustaining ways, the kind of imaginative developments we need (which I believe have to begin in more attention to creative telling) will not have a chance of life.

A fundamental reappraisal Perhaps I am exaggerating how hard times are (in the cultural climate generally and more specifically within the institutions of caring and learning) and how much harder they are still likely to become. Perhaps if we keep our heads down, or nestle into the shelter of whatever collusive truces we are capable of making in our local patches, we will be able to muddle through. But I do not think that will be enough. My growing belief is that we are going to have to undertake a fundamental reappraisal of what we do and what we value, the like of which has never been required of us before. I believe that I and we have been living on borrowed time as far as understanding and communicating the ambiguous, fluid and fleeting engagements in our kinds of psychological concerns. Part of this reappraisal will require us to become more attentive and evocative tellers of what we and others are about. We need to turn towards a toughening concern with who we are, where our kinds of concerns come from, where we should be standing now, what we could be doing that we are still not (perhaps because we continue to be splayed between different conceptual worlds which handicap rather than help us), and where we could and should be going in terms of what we value for our society, for others and ourselves. It would be easier if this reappraisal could just help us to settle more comfortably into what we already do and are, but this is not likely. We have to reach further, not crouch behind the nearest wall. The reappraisal that I want to suggest is quite sweeping. It does not seek any kind of easy rapprochement with simplistic objectification or the kinds of bad faith which

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 shine through so many of the socially divisive and humanly crippling tendencies in the NHS [National Health Service] and many other aspects of our public life. It seeks to act with faith based on what we experience and value in our psychotherapeutic work, and reach out for intellectual honour rather than always seeking a protective accom- modation with the ruling crudities which come with the marketing of care. A promising starting place for this reappraisal, for me, is with the stories we tell concerning the stories we live. A focus on psychology and psychotherapy as creative storytelling disciplines, essentially bound up with language and the ways in which language-in-use shapes our circumstances and ourselves, can open up ways of seeing and thinking which have long been obscured. Much writing in philosophy, linguistics, literary criticism, psychology, sociology, theology and psychotherapy (to name but a few of the disciplines involved in a major rethinking of what we are up to in all our telling and our claims to truth) suggests the Stories we live and stories we tell 127

potential usefulness of considering ourselves as storytellers rather than ‘scientists’ in some restrictive sense. An increasing number of writers are reinterpreting their areas of special interest in psychology and psychotherapy in terms of narration and narrative. Some examples are Shafer (1980) and Spence (1982) in relation to psychoanalytic therapy, Hillman (1975) in relation to Jungian clinical practice, Mair (1988, 1989c) in relation to psychology generally and personal construct psychology in particular, and Romanyshyn (1982) and Howard (1988) concerning general psychology. Along with this perspective comes a fuller recognition that much that is relevant to a psychotherapeutic psychology can be learned from those involved in literature, literary criticism, linguistics, rhetoric, the study of discourse and related disciplines that have often been neglected by psychologists. An important part of the reappraisal I’m proposing is a realignment amongst those disciplines which can contribute most to our richer participation in the telling of profound, precise and moving tales, and which can help our understanding of what is involved in our acts of telling and the interpretation of the diverse kinds of ‘texts’ we create in our attempts to make sense of who and what and where we are. This will mean greater involvement of a psychotherapeutic psychology, a story telling psychology, with many of the disciplines in the humanities which, like ourselves, are most endangered in the present rush towards the technical and the information based.

A focus on telling The issue of how we tell of what we live and what we imagine has, until relatively recently, been all but invisible within psychological disciplines. For most, it still seems to be no issue at all. Yet I suspect it is the very heart of the matter for us, the place where all our lines of interest and influencing, involvement and aspiration meet. I’m not aware of having heard or seen any professional or public concern over this matter. No one seems to be complaining that the public is not being protected adequately or that we are being other than properly professional in what we do as regards the telling of our stories. Yet I believe it is here that we are most particularly being lived by conventions we mostly do not decide ourselves to choose; we are being shaped towards tellings which maintain and recognize only certain kinds of worlds; we are left with sticks and stones, no more, to combat the massed armies of social control which lurk everywhere, always inhabiting the higher ground, always being in place before we come, always controlling the very means we have of offering resistance. As we tell our stories of ourselves, others and our worlds we speak of and speak through the political and philosophical structures we are shaped within. Mostly we do not notice that this is so since amongst the requirements of our most easily available modes of telling is the encouragement to be ignorant of what we are doing. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Creative telling So it is towards literature that we may need to turn to inspire a diversity of ways of telling. We may need to recognize that in poetry, the novel, the short story, the essay, the play and many other forms, there is an abundance of examples of creative and attentive telling. Rather than resting content with the often pedestrian modes of storytelling which are mostly considered acceptable, it may be necessary, if we are to try to catch and convey the life of our times, for a richer involvement in the imaginative narrative forms that might yet be possible for us. In this we would have to give the kind of attention to the development of styles of expression that we presently give to statistics and research design. We would have to take the tasks of telling seriously enough to encourage experimentation and invention. 128 Psychotherapy and story telling

In this it would be necessary to attend to the development of the storyteller in ways that are almost entirely absent from our psychological and psychotherapeutic training. Those entering such a psychological storytelling discipline would have to wrestle again and again with the problems of attention and feeling, form and style. In place of the often formal, unemotional, external stories we now tell concerning those we meet in psychotherapeutic conversation, we would be reaching for greater variety, greater expressiveness, greater precision of observation, greater discrimination. Perhaps we would more often seek to write in non-‘clinical’ ways so that peoples’ lives are explored in the context of other less predetermining perspectives. We might write and speak in ways that keep people within reach of themselves rather than taking their stories away to specialist caves of oblivion. We might seek to write and speak in ways which allow the exploration of the hidden possibilities of being in ordinary, particular lives, so that something of what might be, but has not been imagined or dared, could be laid beside what has so far been chosen and insisted on. It might sometimes be possible to write and speak so that a fuller participation is entered in the life and situation of others and ourselves. Feeling and thinking, observing and imagining are all involved in ways which could make our telling itself a felt event. Sometimes our reporting of peoples’ lives could allow more recognition of their and other points of view. Less often might our writing and speaking be forms of petty pilfer- ing from the lives of others and the imposition of superficial professional monologues. Perhaps through all of this we might become artist/craftsmen and women who seek to make objects of beauty and usefulness for those who come to us. We might become makers of creatively descriptive stories of lives, whether as portraits, sketches or comic cartoons. In all of this there is no substitute for having a go, for actual practice in the arts of telling. Even so, it will be helpful along the way, to attend to literary theory as well as literary practice. There are psychological lessons to be learned from those who have already given devoted attention to the ways in which we tell and what we are up to when we try to create stories of what we know and might yet know.

One voice . . . amongst many In coming towards a conclusion, I will comment on one novelist and commentator on the novel, Milan Kundera. He seems exemplary in both his thoughtful attention to the question of how to understand individual lives and in his delineation of various significant ways in which the human world has changed and continues to change. He recognizes that as we have become more advanced in knowledge, the less are we generally able to see either ‘the world as a whole’ or our own selves. He uses Heidegger’s phrase,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 ‘the forgetting of being’, to describe our modern predicament. He suggests that the history of the novel, from Cervantes onwards, became a major way in which the various ‘dimensions of existence’ were discovered and delineated one by one. He considers the novel to be one expression of that ‘passion to know’, which Husserl considered to be the essence of European spirituality. This, he believes, led it to scrutinize our concrete life and protect it against ‘the forgetting of being’. He suggests that a central concern in the novel has been to hold ‘the world of life’ under a permanent light. I will offer only a few quotations from Kundera (1988). He speaks on the art of the novel, but I hope you can ask questions also of the art of telling which a psychotherapeutic psychology could also undertake to develop further. ‘A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.’ (pp. 5–6) He goes on to claim that a novel is a moral inquiry rather than a moral position. Stories we live and stories we tell 129

(Do we struggle for such ‘discovery’ in our stories? Are our stories of lives genuine ‘inquiries’ rather than defensive position statements?) ‘The world of one single Truth and the relative, ambiguous world of the novel are moulded of entirely different substances. Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel.’ (p. 14) (Does this speak at all to our situation and professional telling?) ‘The novel’s spirit is the spirit of continuity: each work is an answer to preceding ones, each work contains all the previous experience of the novel. But the spirit of our time is firmly focussed on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only.’ (p. 18) (We do, I believe, need to give continuing attention to our cultural past and to create a legitimate history to sustain our present values and future actions.) In asking whether the novel will disappear in the modern world, Kundera says, ‘I merely believe I know that the novel cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time: if it is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on “progressing” as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world.’ (p. 19) (Do we, too, have to recognize more clearly our position of necessary conflict with the kind of authority which blinds and traps us?) In speaking of the way in which the novel has identified changing understanding of the self in society he comes to modern times where he suggests that Kafka provided a completely new orientation. He says that Kafka ‘asks a question that is radically different: ‘What possibilities remain for man in a world where the external determinants have become so overpowering that internal impulses no longer carry weight?’ (p. 26) (Is this how many of our clients, and many of our colleagues, increasingly feel? How is it to be spoken towards any useful recognition?) Emphasizing what we often fail to notice in psychology he stresses that ‘Man and the world are bound together like the snail and its shell: the world is part of man, it is his dimension, and as the world changes, existence changes as well.’ (p. 35) (I do not believe we are nearly attentive enough to this intimate relation of mutual change, preferring instead to insist on telling of relatively stable ‘selves’ and an enduring ‘world’.) He asks a striking question: ‘if man has lost the need for poetry, will he notice when poetry disappears? The end is not an apocalyptic explosion. There may be nothing so quiet as an end.’ (p. 42) (Do we notice that poetry has all but gone from how we tell our professional tales?) Again, something relevant to the psychotherapeutic psychologist: ‘A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility (p. 42) . . . The

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence.’ (p. 44) (Is this true for us too?) And something to note in our changing world . . . ‘Totalitarian society, especially in its more extreme versions, tends to abolish the boundary between the public and the private; power, as it grows ever more opaque, requires the lives of citizens to be entirely transparent.’ (p. 110) He reminds us that it was not the curse of solitude which obsessed Kafka, but the ‘violation of solitude’. (p. 111) (Is this ‘violation’ also penetrating aspects of our professional lives where certain privacies are requirements rather than a defensive avoidance of ‘accountability’?) Then there is something else of relevance to a psychotherapeutic psychology: ‘The novel’s wisdom is different from that of philosophy. The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit, but of the spirit of humour . . . The art inspired by God’s laughter does not by nature serve ideological certitudes, it contradicts them.’ (p. 160) 130 Psychotherapy and story telling

(Do we serve, or seek to contradict, the ‘ideological certitudes’ we live in and are shaped by? Should we be doing other than we are?) ‘Every novel, like it or not, offers some answer to the question: what is human existence, and wherein does its poetry lie?’ (p. 161) (Do we ever ask where the ‘poetry’ lies in the lives of which we tell?) ‘Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress: on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress! (p. 162) . . . Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the non thought of received ideas.’ Kundera claims that Flaubert’s discovery of this progress of ‘stupidity’ is ‘more important for the future of the world than the most startling ideas of Marx or Freud’. (p. 163) (Surely our task, too, is to identify, and reject when we can, the ‘non-thought of received ideas’?) ‘But we know that the world where the individual is respected is fragile and perish- able. On the horizon stand armies of agelastes (those who cannot laugh) watching our every move.’ (p. 164) We too know that the world where the ‘individual is respected’ is ‘fragile and per- ishable’. In how we learn to tell we may offer encouragement and support to some. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CHAPTER 10

PSYCHOTHERAPY, CONVERSATION AND STORY TELLING

Introducing myself and some of my concerns I want to tell you a story about myself and my concerns in relation to the kinds of conversation we call ‘psychotherapy’. Although I will be doing all the talking for the time being, I expect some of you will be responding silently to different aspects of what I say. Thereafter you may want to speak out and say something of what you think in relation to the issues. Beyond the short time we have here, you may continue to ponder some of the matters raised and may engage actively in conversation with colleagues around you, or by writing to myself or some of the other speakers. Thus the story I am beginning to tell is not a separate and free-standing event. It is part of a longer and wider conversation which may involve only yourself, or may include many other people in the months and years to come. Not only is this likely to be so, but my speaking here, my attempt to spell out something more of my mostly inarticulate concerns about Story-Telling and Psychotherapy, is part of ongoing conversations I am already having with myself and with others who speak and write on these matters. My struggle to say something which is more or less honest in relation to my as yet unspecified, tacit, inchoate awareness of this topic is, here and now, part of my own exploration. What I say as if it were firm knowledge may well be a pretence. What I am likely to be doing is trying out one way of putting things, to see how it feels, to sense whether it opens up any possibilities for further understanding. I am seeking alternative ways of putting things which may yet need to be said in many other ways before the possibilities of what is trying to be said are adequately realized.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 This conversation, of which my little story is a part, was not initiated by me but by some of you who decided to invite me here. At that stage in the conversation, whoever made the decision to invite me must have supposed that I might be able to contribute to the ongoing conversations you have been having together about psychotherapeutic and other issues for some time now. But at this stage you still know little about me and my approach (and those things you think you know may be illusory) while I also know little about you and yours. That being so, I’ll say a little about myself and my interests in psychology and psychotherapy, so that you can begin to ‘locate’ me in relation to your own interests, experience, values and prejudices. In that way you may be more able to understand why I go on to tell the kind of tale I do and to sense something of the common ground we share and something of our differences too. In any conversation it is likely to be helpful (and will often be essential) to know something of where the participants are ‘coming from’ 132 Psychotherapy and story telling

in what they say and claim, and something of the kinds of projects they are engaged in (what they are up to, what trying to construct, preserve, validate, negate). I have been a Clinical Psychologist for over thirty years now, and during most of that time have been practising the arts of psychotherapeutic conversation, increasingly in ways which seem to make sense to me. Over the years I’ve found myself reaching for some understanding of myself and others which was rich and capable of great elaboration, while still being simple and accessible to almost anyone. I’ve felt that the subtlety of the Psychoanalytic perspective should be allied with the practicality of the Behavioural, while also being open to areas of human experience which have generally been excluded from the more empirical psychology I was brought up with. I’m thinking here of the relevance of art, literature, language, poetry, religious experiences and understandings, politics, philosophy and anthropology for instance. It’s not that I set out with these large-scale notions as criteria against which to evaluate any new idea, but that I’ve become aware that I want a psychological and psychotherapeutic perspective which incorporates a number of important ‘worlds’ which speak to and of my own experiences (at least) and which the kinds of psychology I was brought up with did not seem to incorporate. Throughout my time as a Clinical Psychologist I’ve been involved in the practice of psychotherapy, but have felt that I had to chart my own course there, rather than be shaped within any of the existing training systems. I felt it important to start, again and again, from my own experience of myself and my life and to seek to attend to the personal experience of others. In this I have been trying to sense the ‘personal’ as a fuller and deeper expression of the social and cultural contexts within which people are composed, not as an area of idiosyncratic individuality. My attention always moves between seeking to inhabit, imaginatively and with feeling, the implicit, inarticulate, experienced world of the other while also attending to the feelings, images, influences arising for me in my relationship with the other in the present moment of conversational meeting. On a philosophical level I have been influenced by the writings on ‘Personal Knowl- edge’ by the philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi (1958). On a psychological level I have been influenced by a number of explorers of the ‘personal’, but especially by the marvellously abstract, imaginative and humane Psychology of Personal Constructs written by the American Psychologist, George Kelly (1955). His approach is, I believe, of great importance within psychology, giving a birds-eye-view [sic], or meta-perspective, on psychological functioning which I found liberating and elegantly powerful. In more recent times I have found myself influenced by a concern with poetic diction, with language and how we use and are shaped by language and by some aspects of literary theory. Of course there have been many other important influences, but all I want to do here is give a flavour of my concerns. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Psychotherapy as conversation I started off this presentation by suggesting that it is essentially conversational, even though, for this moment or two, I am doing all the talking. I want to go much further and say that all life is ‘conversational’, that contexts are formed in which exchanges, transformations, interactions of very many different kinds are made possible in every aspect of our living. We are endlessly engaged in meetings and partings and these can be considered as conversational in form. To misquote the communication theorists, Wat- zlawick, Beavin and Jackson (1968), ‘We cannot not converse.’ Even when we refuse to converse we are engaging in some form of conversing and certain kinds of meanings are being created and shared, certain kinds of possibilities of mutual understanding or misunderstanding are being allowed or disqualified. Psychotherapy, conversation and story telling 133

In using the term ‘conversation’, rather than more formal terms like ‘communication’ or ‘dialogue’ I’m showing the same valuing of informal and everyday notions that I do in preferring the ordinary term, ‘story’, rather than a more technical term like ‘narrative’. My preference here is to stay as close as possible to the terms we use in ordinary life so that we keep having to struggle with the rich, implicit, largely unar- ticulated hinterlands of implications of these terms in the real world, rather than being able to escape into unjustified certainties achieved by defining our terms to fit in with the limits of our present knowledge or current theories. Conversation does not just take place in the use of words. We are also, for instance, engaged in conversation in how we dress, how we move, in what we do and don’t do, in the tones of voice or manner of our actions we employ, in the cars and houses we inhabit. In addition, many of the longer term conversations of our culture are carried on through statements and questions built in stone and steel, in the design of buildings and rooms, or reflected and constituted in the rules of organizations and institutions and much else besides. Now, of course, I am stretching the usual meaning of ‘conversation’ in these various examples and using the term metaphorically as well as literally. The issue of metaphor is of profound and ever present importance in language, conversation and all forms of story telling, in all creative thought and speech (whether verbal or through other modalities of saying). What I am trying to convey is the crucial importance of our ‘speaking together’ in all its forms, and seeking to stress that the language and language use found in what we ordinarily call conversation may prove to be an important metaphor for exploring the many other modes by which meaning is constructed and shared. In my life as a psychologist and psychotherapist I have often felt that I might better be referred to as a ‘professional conversationalist’. It’s not just that I spend so much of my time in different kinds of conversations (some face to face, some in writing, some with individuals, some in larger groups like committees and management meetings, some with problems or concepts or feelings or ideas, some with things, some silently with my self or my selves). It is also that so much of my time is given to trying to attend to the nature of the conversations which I and others are engaged within, composed by, stunted or nourished by, made real or unreal through. So much of my task as a psychologist and psychotherapist is to try to attend to what is going on in the conversations through which we live our lives, and how conversations can be undertaken in ways which allow the possibilities of appropriate movement or stability. In psychotherapy we may need to attend to the kinds of ‘conversational worlds’ we are composing between us. We need to recognize, I think, that conversations are not just ‘to and fro’ affairs like a tennis match in which the ‘ball’ of meaning is carried back and forth between the participants in the form of words and gestures being

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 used. Conversations themselves require us to reach for different metaphors by which to sense aspects of their natures and functions which may otherwise remain unnoticed. Thus, conversations can be seen, for instance, as ‘habitations’ wherein different forms of life can be nourished or stunted, encouraged or rejected, warmed and fertilized or chilled and destroyed. We are dealing with the construction and maintenance of ‘worlds’ within which human meanings are grown or shrunk or transformed in many different ways. Since I am interested, here, in encouraging bridges to be built between literary and psychological or psychotherapeutic concerns I will end this section by quoting the Russian Formalist critic, Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin is deeply concerned with dialogue – the dialogical or conversational. He stresses how all our experience, our awareness, is created between us, socially. A few quotations may indicate the flavour of his interests here. 134 Psychotherapy and story telling

All that touches me comes to my consciousness – beginning with my name – from the outside world, passing through the mouths of others (from the mother, etc.) with their intonations, their affective tonality, and their values. At first I am conscious of myself only through others; they give me their words, the forms and the tonality that constitute my first image of myself . . . Just as the body is initially formed in the womb of the mother (in her body), so human consciousness awak- ens surrounded by the consciousness of others. (Todorov 1984: 96)

Or again (and think of this in relation to psychotherapy, as well as more generally) . . .

I achieve self-consciousness, I become myself only by revealing myself to another, through another and with another’s help. The most important acts, constitutive of self-consciousness, are determined by their relation to another consciousness (a ‘thou’). Cutting oneself off, isolating oneself, closing oneself off, those are the basic reasons for loss of self. . . . The very being of man (both internal and external) is a profound communication. To be means to communicate . . . To be means to be for the other, and through him, for oneself. Man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary; looking within himself, he looks in the eyes of the other or through the eyes of the other . . . I cannot do without the other; I cannot become myself without the other; I must find myself in the other, finding the other in me (in mutual reflection and perception). (p. 96)

And finally . . .

Life is dialogical (or in my terms, ‘conversational’) by its very nature. To live means to engage in dialogue, to question, to listen, to answer, to agree, etc. (p. 97)

Stories and story telling The aspect of conversation that I want to attend to here is ‘story’ and ‘story telling’. Stories come in many different styles and forms. Some are very brief and fragmentary, others are elaborate and have to be worked out over many years or even centuries. Stories and story telling are social events. They are parts of the process of conversation. They take into account, more or less obviously, the audience and context of their telling. The ‘other’, or audience, is relevant to the telling and to what is told (even though this may not seem immediately obvious in more formal pieces of narrative

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 which are written down and published). Long before meeting with you today, you have (in a generalized, unsettling, demanding and even frightening way) been present to me as I’ve scribbled thoughts and as I prepared my typescript. I have felt impelled to take you into account through what I knew or imagined of your interests and concerns (and I may have been well off the mark in much that I tentatively supposed about you), so that I might have a chance of speaking with you rather than at you. Let me quote from something I wrote some years ago on the topic of ‘Psychology as Story Telling’ (Mair, 1988). I find the notion of stories as ‘habitations’ to be a useful place to begin.

Stories are habitations. We live in and through stories. They conjure worlds. We do not know the world other than as story world. Stories inform life. They hold us together and keep us apart. Psychotherapy, conversation and story telling 135

We inhabit the great stories of our culture. We live through stories. We are lived by the stories of our race and place. It is this enveloping and constituting function of stories that is especially important to sense more fully. We are, each of us, locations where the stories of our place and time become partially tellable. (p. 127)

And from later in the same essay . . .

From birth we are told stories of the world we are being induced into. Stories of many kinds, in many ways of telling. We read the stories of our worlds in what is said to us in actions and expressions of all kinds. Almost everything is enacted, not directly stated. We are led to enter the enactments of our tribe so that we become their kind of being, the only way of being human that they really know. This is not an individual matter. We are led out of the story of our culture (which contains many local variations) and we are led into being through the story that is partly spelled out, partly enacted, and everywhere participated within. Just as we can use more words than we can explicitly define so we can act a part in the story of our race without being able to spell out much of what we are doing. The story is greater than any individual. The story gives us eyes and ears attuned to the events that are shaped, not only by the story line, but by the whole atmosphere of its world. (p. 129)

In speaking of ‘story’ in this way I am widening its normal meaning and speaking both literally and metaphorically. I am wanting to use some of what we know about ‘stories’ and ‘story telling’ in their usual meanings, to attend to aspects of our ways of making sense of our lives which might otherwise be approached differently or not at all. In the extended meaning I’m giving to the notion of ‘story telling’, there are many different kinds of stories told by many different ‘tribes’ within our communities, for many different social purposes. Thus the formal scientific report in a journal would be one mode of story telling; a different ‘species’ only of the same ‘genus’ as very different kinds of stories, such as those told by the psychoanalytic psychotherapist, the advertis- ing copywriter or the poet. Part of my interest in the terms ‘story’ and ‘story telling’ (at least within the Eng- lish language) is that these terms have an ambiguous quality. A story can be a ‘true’

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 account of some event or it can refer to a ‘fiction’ or a ‘lie’. Children can be accused of ‘story telling’ when they are suspected of living in a fantasy world rather than the ‘real’ world which their parents recognize. Spies (or any of us when we are up to things which we do not wish to acknowledge publicly) make sure that they have good ‘cover stories’ to hide their tracks and their double lives. Stories are thus ambiguous, made up things, not something given and ‘natural’ or ‘real’. None of this need plunge us into a sense of despair that everything becomes unbearably relative, constructed and local. We do seem to have developed many different rules and conventions for creating stories which are to be considered trustworthy for and within different cultural settings and for different social purposes. What, as psychologists or social scientists, we need to do is to learn to attend to the kinds of stories being told and the ways in which their credibility is created and sustained for particular purposes and groups. 136 Psychotherapy and story telling

We need to recognize, though, that stories are not just things we tell to each other in words and many other ways. We also live in and through stories which cast us, without our knowing or choosing, as characters in dramas which are being played out in our society and culture over many hundreds of years, or in much more transitory form. Stories live us and give us places of meaning and purpose as we come to consciousness within their kinds of worlds. In psychotherapy, we are often having to help people to begin to sense and know some of the stories which continue to shape and control their actions, so that they can, to a degree, begin to choose to live within them, or go elsewhere. Now, my interest in ‘story telling’ (Mair 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c, 1990) is not a path I’m following by myself. There has been an explosion of interest in the whole issue of ‘narrative’ in many different disciplines, including psychology and psychotherapy. A recent paper by George Howard (1991) in the American Psychologist might be a useful introduction to some of what is going on. He quotes Theodore Sarbin (1986) as saying that ‘psychology is narrative’. This is taken from his edited volume entitled Narrative Psychology: the storied nature of human conduct. He also quotes Polkinghorne (1988) (from his book, Narrative Psychology) who says, ‘We make our existence into a whole by understanding it as an expression of a single and developing story.’ Spence (1982) has written imaginatively on Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: meaning and interpretation in psychoanalysis, while Macmillan (1989) has illustrated how issues of narrative can illuminate the therapeutic process. Beyond psychology and psychotherapy, Wiggins (1975) for instance edited a volume called Religion as Story. In his own essay in that book he suggests that ‘a story of real importance is not an argument so much as it is a presentation and an invitation. It presents a realm of experience, accessible through the imagination, and invites participation in imaginative responses to reality, indeed to respond to reality as imaginative’ (p. 20). Stephen Crites (1975) suggests that ‘the formal quality of experience through time is inherently narrative . . . (p. 291) Narrative alone can contain the full temporal- ity of experience in a unity of form. . . . (p. 303) Only narrative form can contain the tensions, the surprises, the disappointments and reversals and achievements of actual experience’ (p. 306). I don’t present any of these statements as unquestionably true and therefore to be taken on trust. Rather do I offer them, to any of you who may not have explored the topic yourselves, to indicate a few of the things which some other thoughtful people have recently been claiming about ‘narrative’ or ‘story telling’. I want now to go on to suggest a few ways in which this perspective on events may be helpful for working in psychotherapy and for trying to understand what may be going on there.

Helping people to tell their stories Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Intimate, personal stories are not easy to tell. Often they resist being told. There seem to be stories whose prime purpose is to make other stories difficult to tell. It is because all stories, other than the most conventional and publicly practised, are difficult to tell that it is sometimes necessary to go to someone who will help you in the telling. And, of course, it is not just a matter of ‘telling’ but of helping the other person to ‘live’ or ‘dwell in’ and experience what they are saying. It is not only that our stories are difficult to tell (and we as professionals find this just as much as do the clients or patients who come to us, as I have found again in the struggle to tell this particular tale today). It is also that we are multi-storied beings. We are composed of stories within stories; stories sustained by other stories; stories held in uneasy opposition to other stories; stories which can, endlessly but not without limits and controls, be opened and entered to reveal other kinds of stories nestling within Psychotherapy, conversation and story telling 137

them, and further stories within and beyond these. There is no end to the stories which can be told in relation to any particular life, stories which constitute that life. And only very few of the stories of any person’s being are allowed any kind of public telling, even within the supposed privacy of their own minds. We are taught in our western, rational and empirical society to trim our versions of ourselves to as simple, logical and publicly justifiable a telling as possible. To have too many stories to tell of who you are is to risk the view that you are mad or poetically fanciful in some unreliable and immature way. So many of us, as well as those who come for psychotherapy, are afraid to speak with imaginative immediacy, to conjure surprising ways of saying into life in order to catch a hint of how and who we feel we are. We mostly trudge along with the most prosaic and conventional ways of telling, and in so doing can hide, from ourselves as well as others, what we feel and what we need to say. In helping people to tell and live into their stories, there are a number of issues which have come to seem important to me. I’ll mention a few of these very briefly because they have a bearing on what will be said later in this presentation. These will be presented as part of the story I now tell myself and others about what I and others may be like, how we may be constructed. No story teller can function without assumptions (or founding stories) concerning the nature of people and their place in the world. Here are some of my assumptions which have changed in the course of my psychotherapeutic life to where they are now.

Stories rather than direct accounts of reality I now assume that when I or others speak of themselves and others they are (so to speak) telling stories, made up and language bound versions, rather than giving direct, transparent accounts of how things really are. I should say, though, that I seldom use the terms ‘story’ or ‘story telling’ in my conversations with clients or patients. People generally believe that they are ‘telling the truth’, telling ‘how things really are’, giving you ‘the facts’ rather than making up a ‘story’ as best they can. While I encourage people to loosen their grip on the ‘real’, unquestionable, given nature of what they are saying, I prefer to use the notion of ‘story’ as a heuristic or guiding device for myself rather than (initially at least) use this term with them. To do so too early seems to get in the way of progress quite often, since people may feel that their account is being disbelieved or devalued. The advantage of the notion of ‘story telling’ is that you thereby make a distinction between what is told, the version of events which is composed (which includes a version of what is made into significant ‘events’), and whatever ‘reality’ may be. ‘Reality’ here is another heuristic device or ‘fiction’ by which we guide our exploration of the unknown depths and possibilities of our worlds. It is not that you can make anything

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 you like into ‘reality’, but it is likely that your reality will be constructed partly and even substantially by yourself and those around you. The notion of ‘story telling’ also emphasizes the importance of language and how we use it and are shaped by that use. The old discipline of Rhetoric, concerning the ways in which significant topics are discovered, how realities are shaped, how arguments are constructed and how persuasive and emotive discourse is achieved, becomes relevant to much that is involved in psychotherapeutic conversation as well as more general conversation.

Stories as conversational in form As I’ve already indicated, I assume that all the stories we tell about ourselves (and think, feel, perceive and speak from) are essentially conversational in nature. That is to say, 138 Psychotherapy and story telling

they are told as part of an engagement with someone or some set of events and are not pure, separate, free standing truths. Since we continue to live in and through stories from many different times of our own lives (from childhood onwards) as well as the life of our community and culture, we have often lost track of the conversational contexts which are needed to make sense of what is being lived out or spelled out in words or other forms. It is important to listen to what is being said to try to sense who is being addressed, what context is required to make sense of what is being claimed or stated as if it were a thought out and generally accepted proposition. Instead of Freud’s intention to replace ‘id’ with ‘ego’ (‘Where id was, there shall ego be’), I’d want to say ‘Where fact or taken for granted reality was, there shall conversation be.’

Metaphor rather than fact as central If we are to listen attentively to the stories of another or help them to tell their own stories more honestly and imaginatively then we will need to develop a love of metaphor. It is not enough to attend to the ‘facts’. It is necessary to listen to the cradles of metaphoric invention which a person uses to give shape to their most ordinary as well as their most intimate thoughts and feelings about themselves and their world. In metaphor we speak of one thing as if it were another so that we may begin to grasp and explore what we mean. Metaphor is of central importance in language and in all human thought. Metaphor is vital for communication in psychotherapy as in all other aspects of life. We need to listen for the metaphors which create both the avenues of freedom and the prison bars of a person’s understanding of themselves or others. All our talk of feelings is immediately and obviously metaphorical, though we are not generally encouraged to notice this by the conventions of our societies which seem determined to create objects out of useful pretences. Thus when we speak of being ‘depressed’ or ‘high’ or ‘stretched’ or ‘light headed’ or ‘mixed up’ or ‘broken hearted’ we are speaking in metaphor. In the psychotherapeutic situation the psychotherapist generally, and certainly the conversational and story telling psychotherapist, needs to try to develop what Aristotle called ‘a command of metaphor’. We need to listen for their use and to practise the creation of new, immediate metaphoric transpositions by which unlikely elements are brought together to offer a vivid sense of what may be happening now in the invisible worlds of meanings which are conjured in our conversational meetings.

Ourselves as multiple rather than unitary Many people who come for psychological help to understand themselves better seem to me to have entirely inadequate ‘maps’ of their own ‘personal geography’. They seem to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 be led to make painfully limiting judgements about what they should feel and shouldn’t feel if they are to consider themselves as ‘normal’ persons. Much of their pain arises from the inappropriately constricted metaphors they have inherited from their parents and culture concerning what it is to be a person. One of the common problems is that people seem to be led to suppose that they are unitary beings (single selves, coherent psychological entities), rather than recognizing (what I assume to be more appropriate) that they are multiple and many centred (having, as it were, many selves, many different centres of awareness and perspective on events). This issue of our multiple natures has, of course been recognized by very many philosophers, psychologists and others throughout the centuries (Rowan 1990), but these lessons do not seem to have been widely heard. If people are going to be helped to become better story tellers for themselves, then they need to have a metaphoric stance which allows them to recognize and experience Psychotherapy, conversation and story telling 139

through their many potential selves. If they are trying to make sense of their experience from within the notion that they are single and unitary, then everything which does not fit some major claim about themselves must be excluded as an aberration or suppressed in one way or another. This is a sure way to pain and psychological strain. The notion that we are multiple rather than unitary beings is wider than the notion that we might usefully think of ourselves as if we were many selves rather than a single self. Yet this particular metaphoric pretence is one that I often find to be particularly helpful. It allows a person to begin to sense how different parts of their experience can be understood as different characters, different voices, different persons within a ‘community of selves’ which has all the characteristic issues of politics and prejudice, quar- rels and alliances of any other public communities with which we are more familiar (Mair 1977a). It can thus help a person to sense their own possibilities of experience and action in a way which allows more articulate and sensitively discriminating stories to be told of what they are up to and what is going on for them in their private and public dealings with other selves, other communities of selves.

Ourselves as totally immersed in our worlds rather than being independent observers A final issue which has a substantial bearing on the story telling psychotherapist has to do with the assumptions we make about our place in the world and how we can come to know something of that. Here again I have come to make assumptions which are somewhat different from many of my colleagues. Traditionally, in the kind of empirical, experimental psychology which I was trained to regard as fundamental to developments in knowledge which might have clinical and therapeutic usefulness, it is assumed that the Experimenter stands separate from the experiment he or she is organizing. He or she can thus observe the developing events in a distant, dispassionate and objective manner. Being defined as separate from the Subjects within the experimental situation it is assumed that the Experimenter, the Psychologist, is an independent, impartial onlooker whose very lack of involvement is a guarantee of being unbiased and fair-minded. This same kind of assumption seems to inform much of psychology, the assumption that we are independent human beings who can stand back, observe others and make rational judgements. It is not what I have come to assume. I find myself to be much more tangled up in my circumstances, background, culture, history, feelings than the notion of the ‘separate observer’ implies. I also find this with those who come to me for help. We all seem to be lived by the stories of our race and place and are able, only sometimes and to limited degrees, to spell out some of what we are up to and what is going on around us and through us. We seem to me to be almost totally immersed in

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 our cultural worlds and scarcely at all like the ‘independent observer’ who is widely postulated in our society as well as in the main streams of psychology. If we are almost totally immersed in our place, time and cultural contexts, then how are we to come to know anything of where we are and what is going on? The setting up of the limited and stilted conversational worlds we call ‘experiments’, which often adopt rather than question the assumptions of our place and time, are unlikely to help us as much as we have generally been led to suppose. What we may need to do instead is to develop our imaginative, intuitive capacities so that we may have some chance of breaking through the conventional patterns of logic by which we can only arrive at conclusions already known, We may need to attend as much to Giambattista Vico as to Rene Descartes (Verene 1981), and begin to recognize that the development of intimate knowledge may have to begin in images, in poetic expressions of felt patterns, rather than by the breaking down and rearrangement of given categories. 140 Psychotherapy and story telling

As seems appropriate for an approach to psychology and psychotherapy which is concerned with conversation, story and metaphor, the development of our capacities to conjure images of what is happening between and amongst us may be of crucial importance. Only when fertile and useful images have been conjured into being may it become possible for the patterns they trace and the implications they suggest to be tested in logical or experimental ways. Images and imagery become basic to our enterprise, and will require cultivation by methods and disciplines which are scarcely available in psychology to date.

Aspects of story telling in psychotherapy Different approaches to stories and story telling can be taken. Attention can be paid to the structure of the narrative, to the use of language (its figurative and syntactical arrangements), to the rhetorical devices by which different persuasive ends are achieved or forms of reality given expression, to the recurrent themes and plots being adopted by a person, to the types of stories (whether tragic, comic, romantic, satirical) commonly used at different stages of life or therapy. My concern is more ‘conversational’. I want to draw attention to some of the ways in which the therapist and patient respond to each other. My focus will be on some of the issues involved as patients tell their stories and the therapist joins in the cooperative processes through which the stories which the patient both lives and tells are re-told and re-newed. When clients or patients come for psychotherapy they are almost immediately asked to tell something of their story. For some people this may be the first time they have tried to tell their own story to someone else. The act of telling can be emotionally demanding but the telling is usually found to be helpful in itself. On being asked about what helped them in psychological therapy, it is common for people to say seemingly vague and general things like: ‘Just speaking to someone who understood made all the difference’; ‘Speaking to someone outside the family helped to get things into perspective’; ‘Feeling that what I said was being listened to was important’. The act of telling your story, in the context of being listened to and more or less understood, may itself be a major validating and confirming experience for many. Here, though, I want to mention a few other aspects of telling which crop up in psychotherapeutic conversation.

Attending to who is speaking A recurrent requirement is to pay attention to ‘who’ is speaking to you. We each speak with many ‘voices’, from different parts of our selves, from different ‘selves’ if you like,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 and it is often important and not always clear who is speaking. In seeking to understand which story is being enacted it matters who is doing the telling. Just as you would place a different interpretation on an account of Government policy if given by the Prime Minister or the leader of an Opposition party, so also in ourselves. We are capable of sliding rapidly and without any warning (or awareness) from one voice to another, as if nothing had happened. No wonder we sometimes confuse ourselves and others. If you ask people in a group who are meeting together in this context for the first time to say a little about themselves, they will each tell you and the others something. If you then ask them to describe the ‘person’ who did the speaking they and you may begin to sense more of what has been going on. One person may speak of feeling embarrassed and being aware (now that the question is being asked) that the part of themselves which spoke was much younger than they are now, perhaps just a girl. The things said and the feelings experienced were of awkwardness and defensiveness Psychotherapy, conversation and story telling 141

in meeting adults. Another person may recognize that the person who spoke was a strong, well protected, tough part of themselves, suspicious of other people and determined to give no information away that might be used against them; another may be a very needy part of themselves which could not be restrained and poured out much more intimate information than the person had expected to find themselves offering at this stage. With one woman I’ve been working with for a considerable time now (we’ll call her, Mary), it has become particularly important to identify and comment on who is speaking. Mary is a deeply disturbed person who was frightened and hurt by people in her world from very early in her life. She reacted by creating an inner world which was peopled by six very definite and different beings, each with a certain position and set of responsibilities in this private domain. Mostly Mary is trapped in misery, black- ness and self loathing, but gradually she has been reaching out a little to make some contact with me. What has become clear is that almost all the self hatred, cutting criticism and tirades of abuse about herself come from one of her selves and it is increasingly easy for me to recognize when that one is speaking. Mary’s tone of voice changes and she speaks with decisive, almost hissing, venom. If I were to assume that this voice represented Mary as a whole, I’d be quite misled. Behind the fierce attacks launched by this particular being, I have come to know that there are other parts of Mary (each having, long ago, been given a name by her) which are longing for some other world than this terrifying prison she has become trapped within. Mary is something of a special case, since she has knowingly developed her inner world of identified and named beings who now constitute who she is. Most of us are not in this position, but it can still be very helpful to listen for who is speaking and who has been rendered silent.

Changing the terms in which the story is told Often a crucial step in the therapeutic process is when it becomes possible to change the terms in which the patient’s story is being told. This is not a matter of rejecting the terms they are using, but of introducing a different level and kind of telling from that which is ordinarily used. My favourite example is from quite some time ago. A very organized, intelligent, disciplined business woman came to see me because she had begun to experience panic attacks when travelling, in church and in other enclosed places. She came very well prepared to her first meeting with me. She was smartly, neatly, tightly dressed in a business suit. She let me know as soon as she sat down that she expected that I’d want her to give an account of her life and problem. She had thought about this and immedi-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 ately started giving me the most precise, logical, historically organized, detailed version of her life. I found myself struggling to take enough notes on what she was saying. She was so fluent, precise, unhesitating in what she had to say that I soon became aware that I was not going to be able to keep up with her. I began to feel slightly uneasy. Was I going to be able to cope with this highly organized and logical woman? She rather alarmed me. As I listened and became more aware of my discomfort, I encouraged myself, as so often, to attend to how I was feeling in her presence, here and now. I noted some of my discomfort and then tried to allow some image or picture to float to my mind which might give me a more coherent sense of what was going on between us. What almost immediately came to me was an image of a suit of armour, all precise, shiny, in perfect working order, invulnerable and impenetrable. I also had a sense of there being a tiny, naked, defenceless figure crouching in the left toe of the suit of armour. 142 Psychotherapy and story telling

This image was still with me as I returned all my attention to my client as she was coming to the end of her remarkably complete, detailed and emotionless account of how she had become terrified, panic stricken and unable to cope in anything like the efficient way she was accustomed to. As she was rounding off her story, she finished with the following words: ‘So I’ve come to see you so that you can patch up my armour!’ The vivid metaphor she was using, without any awareness that she was saying something significant, struck me with its immediate power. Here she was, quite unwittingly, speaking of her condition in a way which was quite different from the endless catalogue of events (though these were important too) which she had just been reciting. I drew her attention gently to the metaphor she was using, so that it could begin to be seen as a metaphor rather than as an almost irrelevant manner of speaking, a joke. I asked her if she sometimes felt as if she were encased in armour and whether there was someone very different inside the armour. She was immediately arrested and slowed by the question. She acknowledged that this was how she often felt. I asked her if she could try to pay attention to what the person inside the armour felt. As she stopped to think about this (it seemed to make complete sense to her), her whole body became softer, less rigid and upright, her eyes showed signs of moisture, the tone of her voice lowered and she spoke for the first time with real feeling in her words. She let me know how very frightened and hurt that person inside the armour was and how she had long ago been hidden from sight in her life. She felt, as a young woman of about 17 years of age, that she had made a mess of her life by marry- ing a man who abused and then left her (just as her mother had warned her he would). She felt that this vulnerable, impulsive, emotional side of herself had to be hidden and protected and kept out of her life. Thereafter she had made a determined and successful attempt to live her life in a logical and dutiful way . . . until the recent panic attacks had threatened her whole sense of control and the whole world she had constructed. I won’t take this story further here, but want to emphasize the powerful ways in which this kind of metaphoric recasting of the felt sense of what is going on can speak with greater depth and immediacy to the other person. By attending to the manner of the person’s telling (as well as to what is being told) and to the metaphors they spontaneously use, ‘doorways’ may often be found through which you may both pass to a different kind of ‘story world’. The whole feeling and intimacy of their story can be entered at a different level and in a more moving and personally meaningful way.

Re-telling the story with a different meaning Often people come for psychological help and show, in the way they tell their story, that they have a ‘map’ or understanding of themselves as people which traps or con-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 fuses them. They may well be making assumptions which lead them to interpret experiences and feelings as alarming problems, when a different set of assumptions would allow them to accept and live much more comfortably with what has had to be rejected because it did not seem to fit in with how they felt they should be. In this situation a major therapeutic step can be taken by the therapist re-telling part of the patient’s story, but with one or more assumptions about what it is to be a human being changed. I’ll use the ‘suit of armour’ lady as an illustration of what I mean. As a young woman, Mary admitted that she had been headstrong and independent. She met and almost immediately married a man who her mother strongly disapproved of, her mother warning her repeatedly that the marriage would be a disaster. Within a couple of months, everything her mother predicted came true and the marriage broke up. Mary felt shattered and ashamed. Although she had no money and nowhere to live she had too much pride to go back to her mother’s home and admit her mistake. Psychotherapy, conversation and story telling 143

A little while later she met an older man who had recently become a widower. He had two young sons. When Mary and he eventually married, Mary made a vow to herself that she would never again put her own feelings and impulses first. From now on her whole life would be devoted to her husband and his sons. She was determined not to make the same mistake twice and committed herself to becoming a perfect wife and stepmother. By the time she came to me, her husband’s two boys had become young men, though both of them still lived at home. Mary had succeeded remarkably well in putting the boys and her husband first in all things. Thus, if she was at home watching television, and one of the boys came into the room and wanted to watch a different programme, he would just change channels without asking permission or apologizing for interrupt- ing Mary’s viewing. She simply accepted such behaviour . . . after all, she had no rights and was committed to putting them first in all things. The first ‘panic’ attack came when she was crossing the English Channel with her husband, going on holiday to Germany. They had gone to Germany for a number of years for their holiday. Everything was familiar about the journey and the crossing, so why should she suddenly feel so terrible? Mary couldn’t understand it at all and wor- ried that she might be going mad or cracking up completely. As I listened to her story, I guessed that Mary assumed that it was quite possible to banish part of her self, her own spontaneous nature, and keep it out of her life just because she decided to do so. She seemed to assume that no price would be paid and that because she was determined to act and feel differently from how she had as a young woman, that was all that was needed. I tried to put myself imaginatively into her situation, into her life, I tried to dwell in her story, but with my assumption that parts of ourselves which we try to suppress will find a way to make their presence felt at some later stage. What I began to feel was a sense of anger building up. ‘How dare these boys who had been served so dutifully and with such devotion treat me like this? How could I bear to go, yet again, to Germany which I greatly disliked, just because my husband again wanted to do that? Of course, I have no rights at all and I have decided long ago to attend only to what my husband and sons want and seem to need . . . ’ I begin to get a sense of how frustrated and angry Mary may have been becoming. The parts of herself which had been banished may have been returning. I ask her if she has ever been angry in her life. She says that she used to feel angry quite often when she was young, but that she hadn’t felt angry at all during all the time of her present marriage. I ask her to think of the feelings she had on the ferry as she and her husband were crossing the Channel and to think back to the last time she remembered feeling angry. How did these feelings compare with each other? She is shocked and surprised, puzzled. It felt just as if I was angry, she suggests. We explore this possibility as she describes what she felt and what she had come to call

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 ‘anxiety’ or ‘panic’. I gently try to tell her story again, with my different assumption made clear. What if this was an important and essentially good part of herself which had had enough of being taken for granted, pushed around and ignored? What if she was beginning, at long last, to assert herself? I suggest that she may have been feeling angry and abused for some years now, without noticing this because these were feelings which had been excluded from her life. It is obvious that this re-telling of her story is immediately recognizable to her. She begins to experiment with its implications for her life. Could she dare to tell her husband that she feels she is being taken for granted? Could she possibly begin to suggest that she has some rights as well as duties? Could she possibly be so ‘selfish’ as to tell her step-sons that they owed her some ordinary human respect? I needn’t go on with this. What I’m trying to illustrate is the way in which re-telling the story with a slight change in the assumptions being made can change the whole 144 Psychotherapy and story telling

‘world’ the person senses themselves to be living within. It can immediately offer other pathways for imaginative or enacted exploration and allow reassuring sense to be made of many events which had seemed much more frightening till then.

Retrieving stories which have become silent It is my impression that we are endlessly talking to ourselves, forever telling ourselves what is so and how we should react and what we should feel. Mostly these stories have become invisible and silent. This in no way diminishes their persistence and active powers, however. Quite the reverse. Let me illustrate this with another therapeutic tale. Barbara came for help with her quite uncontrollable terror of spiders. She was not just afraid of spiders. She was terrified of them and described in vivid detail how she lost all sense of control when she saw a spider in the bath or somewhere else around the house. She would be unable to stop herself screaming. She would run out of the house and drag any man who was passing into her house to deal with the offending creature. She wouldn’t be reassured and begin the long process of calming down till she had seen the spider actually killed. Barbara was convinced that spiders had a special attraction for her. Wherever she was, spiders seemed to appear. As she spoke, her eyes were restlessly searching my room for any sign of the terrible creatures. As I listened to her, to the excitement she generated and the sense of drama with which she invested these events, I got a sense of the kind of stories she may have been telling herself repeatedly and almost continuously. Rather than just putting this as an intellectual possibility to her, I began to speak and enact what might be silently going on in her own head. I suggested that she listen and try to feel if what I was saying and doing made any sense to her. I spoke excitedly and quickly, pretending I was moving from one room in her home to another. I tried to produce a running commentary of the kinds of things she might be saying to herself without noticing them . . . ‘Oh my God, is there going to be a spider in here . . . I’ll never be able to stand it if there is . . . I know it’s there . . . I can feel it watching me, waiting to get me . . . If I do see it I’ll panic, I’ll scream, I’ll have to get out . . . Oh my God, this is terrible . . . I can’t bear to look but I have to look because it will be waiting there for me . . . This is going to be awful . . . How can I possibly get through the day with this happening all the time . . . etc. . . . etc.’ As I went on, becoming more excited and urgent in my commentary, Barbara began to laugh almost uncontrollably with delight. ‘That’s just what I do!’ she said, ‘It’s always like that.. ‘I feel that if I’m not looking they will come. It’s an endless night- mare. When I’m not expecting them to be there, they come out. If there’s a spider in

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 the room it will run at me.’ I suggest to her that she’s living with a ‘frantic companion’ in her head who is endlessly warning her, frightening her, preparing her, encouraging her to be alert, threatening her with disaster if she doesn’t take the most complete precautions. As I conjure up a picture of this imaginary companion, this other self, who speaks so excitedly so much of the time, Barbara comments that she recognizes this person very well. ‘She’s an absolute maniac,’ she says emphatically. ‘My husband says that when we have a row you go on and on and don’t stop! He has had to get hold of me and has had to scream at me to shut up. She’s a bit of a looney!’ she insists. As soon as she has indicated that she recognizes this ‘frantic companion’ in adult life, she goes on to tell stories of how her mother used always to have to tell her to ‘Slow down!’ She then gives an account of how this side of herself was very well developed when she was a young girl. Psychotherapy, conversation and story telling 145

As she tells this part of her story, she recognizes, for the first time, that this ‘frantic’ side of herself is not all bad. In fact she recognizes that everything she’s ever done or been successful at has been because of the way in which this aspect of herself would persist in things long after other people had given up. She began to recognize that she loved excitement and valued the determination of this side of herself. As we spoke I think we both had a sense that her continuously generated excitement about spiders was beginning to look like something different from how it at first appeared. A different story was emerging.

Seeking the author rather than the characters I’m not sure that I believe in the notion of a central and essential Self since I suspect any sense of coherence is achieved by social structures and the kinds of private organization of our selves which is a reflection of the kinds of public organizational principles by which a person has been influenced. There do, however, seem to be occasions when it is relatively easy to identify the different selves or characters who populate the person’s private world, but it is much more difficult, and may become the prime task of therapy, to retrieve or compose some centre of authority, an author, who has a significant say in what is going on in a person’s life. In this case there are likely to be many characters, working together in a more or less orderly manner, but no clear ‘I’ who can claim some identity with and responsibility for what is being felt and done by the different ‘parts’. The problem here seems to be how to create an ‘identity’, to achieve a cohering story which speaks the pattern of a person’s commitments into an intelligible and useful form. Mary is one such patient. She never uses the pronouns ‘I’ or ‘me’. She seems to live only as six ‘sub-humans’ who live in an uneasy and painful struggle with each other. Amongst them there seem to be powerful rules of behaviour, giving strict duties and areas of legitimate operation for each, but with terrible punishments being inflicted for any deviations. In attempting to speak to someone outside this secret world (no one ever having been allowed any knowledge of or access to this darkly sickening place) the most basic rules of secrecy governing the place have to be broken by someone on the inside. As one of the ‘beings’ tentatively and fearfully tries to overcome its deep knowledge of the fundamental crime being committed in speaking to an outside person (myself as therapist in this instance), it is immediately and persistently tortured by the punishments meted out by another ‘self’ whose prime role is to maintain the harsh totalitarian regime. For Mary, there is no one outside the parts, there is only the ‘place’. For her, the different ‘selves’ are not metaphoric expressions of aspects of herself. They seem to be ‘real’ beings, not any kind of useful make believe.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 The struggle of one, and sometimes two, of her ‘sub-humans’ to smuggle out sufficient scraps of information about what is going on in their private hell of a world for me to begin to patch together some kind of sense of what is happening is truly an epic undertaking. Terrible terrors are inevitably and always stirred into being. My attempts to draw her firmly divided nature back into the world of metaphor and alternative social possibilities of self understanding are painfully slow, with many retreats from any explicit conversation when the pain and punishment become too much. A different instance of this particularly demanding kind of story composition is illustrated by John, who I have only recently begun to see. He has become a seemingly coherent but pervasively fragmented, fictional being. He has constructed so many ‘boxes’ within his mind where he keeps different parts of his life separate from all the others, so many doors which open and close to allow some aspects of himself to be seen by selected sections of his world, so much questioning and disqualifying of every 146 Psychotherapy and story telling

stance he could take, that he has all but disappeared as a person. He is a ‘post-modern’ man in the ways in which be flits from perspective to perspective, knowing that there is no reassuringly stable or persisting vantage point from which the story of his life can be told as if in a realist, nineteenth century novel. Everything is in question. Everything is shifting. Every claim is matched and disqualified by counter claims. There seems to be ‘no one’ who can speak for him, no position which is not immediately ridiculed and undercut. Each of these patients raises important questions about what constitutes ‘personal identity’ in our culture. Each faces the therapist with stories which remain separate, refusing any easy combination into an authoritative and authorized version of the life involved.

Continuing the conversation The approach to psychology and psychotherapy that I’ve been suggesting requires us to become disciplined and adventurous practitioners in the use of metaphor and imagination. It encourages us to give passionately careful attention to how we speak together. It encourages us to become psychological poets and not just dutiful data collectors. I believe that we are very limited in how we speak and tell, in how we listen, respond and participate within our worlds. We are often trapped within stories which are too mean and within worlds of untellable possibilities. My hope is that, against all the odds, some will seek to develop a poetic precision and freedom of language so that they may more truly speak of who and where they are. Many of the topics which I’ve touched on (such as metaphor, conversation, narrative, story and rhetoric) have become hugely fashionable in recent years within many different disciplines. Many different kinds of psychological undertakings now fly under these banners. In so many places the methods of the old empiricism seem, yet again, to be destroying imaginative possibilities which have scarcely had a chance of life. I will finish by quoting from something written by my colleague, Angus Macmillan (1989). In a paper entitled ‘Developmental Narratives: the construction of life stories in therapy’ he ends by saying . . . The attraction of construing the whole process as one of storying and re-storying is in the kind of psychology that it suggests. Instead of viewing the enterprise as one in which reality is painstakingly encircled, by a long and earnest accumulation of facts, as more and more research is done, we have a model of a progressive unfolding of the possibilities of being, with each unveiling helping to deepen and enrich, but none seeking to be The Story that ends all stories. It continues the conversation. And that seems a very appropriate credo for therapy. (p. 27) Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 PART V

UNDERSTANDING Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 This page intentionally left bank Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 CHAPTER 11

A LONG TERM QUEST FOR UNDERSTANDING1

Introduction The title I have chosen for this paper comes from one of George Kelly’s last major essays, ‘A brief introduction to personal construct theory’ (Kelly 1970). Here he begins to open a door which I want to push further and try to enter. (In quoting Kelly, I will substitute a variety of more general terms for words like ‘man’ or ‘men’, when that is easily possible, but leave such words when any changes would be too tortuous. I have the sense that his regular use of the masculine gender now gets in the way of listening to what he is saying, for many people.) He has been introducing his idea of trying to understand ordinary people as though they were rather like scientists and goes on to say . . .

This is not a question of whether or not (people) do, in fact, live by the canons of science . . . We are not in search of such a neat conclusion, but of a strategic advantage in a long term quest for understanding (my emphasis). No theory can offer us more than that. The issue, then, is what this constructive alternative of seeing (a person) as an incipient scientist will contribute at the present state in the search for a psychological understanding of him (or her). Who knows – a by- product of this venture may be new light on scientific endeavour itself. In fact, I think I can see such a by-product emerging as personal construct theory suggests ways in which psychological processes we have hitherto spurned may enliven the scientific enterprise. (p. 8)

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 I’ll also quote another relevant passage, this time from the essay, ‘Sin and psychotherapy’ (Kelly 1969a).

The psychologist who attempts to assist his fellow man should keep this truth central to his (or her) system of practice. The task is to assist the individual (person) in what is singularly the most important undertaking in his (or her) life, the fullest possible understanding of the nature of good and evil (my emphasis). . . . This inquiry is the chosen quest of all mankind, and that includes both you and your client. Don’t abandon it under any conditions – whether guilt, fear or laziness. Don’t abandon it for any set of prefabricated conclusions. Above all, don’t let your client abandon it! (pp. 186–7) 150 Understanding

Earlier in the same essay Kelly says something else which may be helpful here. He has been using the story of Adam and Eve as a metaphor to allow him to explore various issues of human choice and action.

I am well aware that there is little precedence in scientific discourse for talking about sin, and much less for talking about the Garden of Eden. Scientists are reluctant to talk about things they cannot put their fingers on, or are not sure really happened the way they have been reported. But when a story has been told and retold through the centuries and it challenges, as this story does, generation after generation of scholars, then only the scientist who is wilfully blind to human nature can ignore what is currently going on. Certainly the psychologist, least of all scientists, can afford to ignore it altogether. (p. 168)

These quotations set the scene for me by introducing various issues which I will try to develop further. The word ‘understanding’ is used again and again by Kelly; he was clearly very concerned about seeing human endeavours across the centuries, as well as in the context of our own lives; he was interested in what ‘science’ and especially that ‘least of all’ sciences, psychology, might yet become, with what we might yet make of it; he was deeply concerned, perhaps perplexingly for many of us, that we pursue ‘the fullest possible understanding of the nature of good and evil’ as the major issue in life, psychotherapy and psychology; he was keen to draw into the realm of legitimate reference, for the kind of psychology he was proposing, ancient religious/wisdom stories which have ‘challenged generations of scholars’ and many other people too; and he was obviously trying to create a new kind of psychological discipline which was open to all of these and other related issues. I want to try to place the kind of Personal Psychology which Kelly was creating more firmly in the lineage of ‘religious’ and ‘moral action’ traditions. I’ll try to shine a clearer light on the ‘reformation’, in scientific/psychological life, which I sense he was attempting.

What am I up to and involved in? This chapter tells something of my personal journey of exploration in relation to Personal Construct Psychology. It is not a review of the literature nor an even handed account of the new horizons others have glimpsed by standing on Kelly’s shoulders, or any other parts of his anatomy. Because of this, I feel I should let you know something of my concerns.

What is my quest? Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 I’ve been involved in a dance with Kelly for the last thirty five years. This has been like a ‘square’ or ‘progressive’ dance, in which you meet your partner from time to time to spin around and make other kinds of steps together, advancing and retreating perhaps, before moving on to meet and twirl with others. Always, though, you come back to your initial partner to meet and smile again. My initial excitement when reading his chunky volumes – a mixture of illumination, delight and a sense of expansive beauty – was remarkable to me, since I’d scarcely read anything in my previous four years of psychological study which had touched me. Again and again I’ve returned to Kelly to see if I could yet understand what did touch me so clearly then. I’ve always been left with a strong sense that, though I may have come a little closer sometimes, I haven’t yet been able to enter his place of vision. Here I am coming round again for another meeting in the dance. A long term quest for understanding 151

Where has my searching been taking me? Who else have I been dancing with, over the years and more recently? I’ll mention only a few of my other dancing partners here. Language, what we can do with language and what it can do with us, has been a continuing friend. From early on I became interested in ‘rhetoric’, though I didn’t know it by that name till quite recently. My interests in metaphor, poetic diction, story and conversation have all contributed to my understanding, such as it is, of what Kelly may have been up to. His own pleasure in language has given me considerable enjoyment. I’ve come to notice more of how, as a good ‘rhetor’ or ‘public speaker’, he constructs traps of meaning as he places webs of metaphor across our paths. I’m sure that the ancient discipline of Rhetoric was not unfamiliar to him. No doubt because of my Scottish, Protestant upbringing, Christianity has been another issue for me as it obviously was for Kelly. Kelly seemed to have arrived at a comfortable and constructive way of weaving his Christian concerns into the psychology he was developing. He makes it clear that he regarded Jesus as an excellent example of a Personal Construct psychologist. He uses Biblical stories to draw out further possible meanings, relevant to the psychology he was creating. He is very ready to mix terms like ‘sin’, ‘repentance’ and ‘forgive- ness’ alongside others like ‘role relations’, ‘reconstruing’ and ‘anticipation’. He made remarkably bold statements about ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as essential matters of concern for psychologists, psychotherapists and clients. He often speaks of ‘God’, in ways that may still make many ‘politically correct’ psychologists turn away in discomfort. He also speaks of ‘the death of God’ in ways which resonate with much of my own more recent reading and thinking. He speaks of this, for instance, in his essay on ‘Ontological acceleration’ (Kelly 1969e).

Even God, the most powerful circumstance of them all, is nowadays said to be dead . . . yet in a peculiar theological way it is a sweeping declaration of independence on the part of (persons) who are ready to accept responsibility for their acts and are ceasing to acknowledge the guiding power of any circumstances, even the greatest of them – God. As theologians sometimes do – to the amazement of scientists who rather think of themselves as being more precise with words – these men state the new humanistic proposition most succinctly. They say simply, ‘God is dead.’ (p. 27)

One of their main concerns of current ‘death of God’ theologians (e.g. Cupitt 1987, 1994; Hart 1993; Geering 1994) is to explore the implications of this position for a

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 much more fully responsible undertaking of personal and social life. This strong concern with ‘responsibility’ echoes a dominant theme in Personal Construct Psychology. Kelly emphasized this by characterizing his whole approach as being concerned with ‘epistemological responsibility’. That is to say, he was concerned that we become far less ready to attend only towards events of all kinds, while remaining blind to the positions from which we act and the procedures by which we make sense or nonsense of our worlds. Buddhism has been another interest, becoming more detailed and personally involving in more recent years (I should perhaps say that I am neither a Christian nor a Bud- dhist, but have considerable interest in both traditions. With this interest I see myself as acting as a person and a psychologist, not as a ‘believer’ or ‘devotee’). Kelly recounted, with some pleasure, that his theoretical approach had been characterized in many different ways by different people, including being described as 152 Understanding

‘Zen Buddhist’. This ambiguity pleased him considerably since he wanted to open up new ways of thinking of our experiences, without insisting on all the familiar demarcation lines. I’ve been reading more widely in Buddhism, including the Tibetan, Zen and Thera- vadin approaches. Though only an interested outsider, I could not fail to be struck by the many similarities (as well as the differences) between Buddhist Philosophy and Personal Construct Psychology. Let me just mention a few of the similarities which come to mind. Both systems are concerned with how we create our own ways of making sense of ourselves and our worlds; both see this sense- and nonsense-making in terms of dualities; both recognize clearly that our ‘ways’ of doing things, whether in how we ‘perceive’, ‘think’ or ‘act’ constitute the pathways of our everyday lives (Joanna Macy (1991), in World as Lover, World as Self, quotes the monk-scholar Bhikku Nanananda describing the constructs or codes by which we interpret our world as ‘the ruts and grooves of our mental terrain’. I guess that will sound pretty familiar to those who know that Kelly often used very similar terms, including ‘grooves’, ‘pathways’, ‘channels’, and ‘two-way streets’).

What are some of my changing understandings of PCP? This leads on to a consideration of some of the changes that have been taking place recently in my understandings (or misunderstandings) of Personal Construct Psychol- ogy. All the strands of my earlier concerns become interwoven here. My impression is that the whole ‘religious’, fundamentally questioning, approach to our ‘long term quest for understanding’ seems mostly to have been lost. This has tamed and diminished the sweep and awfulness of what Kelly was opening. By ‘religious’ here, I mean something like a fundamental ‘root and branch’ questioning of who and what and where and how we are. The kind of questioning which unsettles the very basis of what we ordinarily assume and opens us to possibilities of radical transformation of what we take ourselves to be. A ‘religious’ perspective is concerned with fundamental issues of how we define ourselves and others, how we see our engagements with events, what we understand our relationships to reality to be. In this kind of questioning we are liable to lose a sense of solid ground under our feet and may have to learn, psychologically, how to ‘fly’. I want to sketch out a few notions which, in smaller or larger ways, unsettle some of the ground on which psychological science normally stands.

Anticipation Kelly referred to this as the ‘push and pull’ of Personal Construct Psychology. It is, per-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 haps, the most central notion in his whole approach. I’ve recently done something which I should have done years ago. I looked ‘anticipation’ up in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and among the various, historically arranged meanings was the following: preparing for, precluding or preventing events. To me this brought a shock of new life. Suddenly a new sense of depth, duplicity, complexity and underhandedness opened up. This sense of ‘anticipation’ began to feel like the sort of double-edged, contradictory range of meanings which could form the basis of a profound statement about everyday and scientific life. Now the Fundamental Postulate reads like this: A person’s processes are psychologically channellized by the ways in which he/she prepares for, precludes or prevents events! Here we have the trickiness of human life. Sometimes our anticipation is about ‘preventing’ things happening (as when a boss keeps staff so insecure and pressurized that A long term quest for understanding 153

they haven’t the spirit left to rebel). Sometimes our anticipation is about ‘precluding’ certain possibilities (as when people are led to feel grateful to their rulers, thus hiding from them even the possibility of realizing that they are being oppressed). Always and in many different ways our ‘anticipation’ is a ‘preparing for’, though this can be in many different negative as well as positive ways (since we can prepare ourselves to feel anger by endlessly practising negative views and judgements, or we can prepare ourselves for examination success by planning and undertaking all the necessary work). For me, this perspective on ‘anticipation’ is much more disquieting and exciting than the more limited, sterilized notion of ‘prediction’, which is really just a ‘saying before it happens’. With this more complex notion of ‘anticipation’, we are in the heart of the potential subtlety and complicity of rhetorical formulations and persuasions; we are in the midst of deception and seduction; we begin to be able to see how each and every one of our actions inevitably prepares for certain eventualities, and all involve the preventing and precluding of many other possibilities. In every act we are guilty and innocent. We betray what we preclude and brutalize what we prevent. What could this begin to open up for us as we look at what we are doing in psychological science (or science more widely)? What are we preparing for? What are we preventing in determined, blatant or subtle ways? What are we precluding by making questions all but unaskable? If we go beyond that, what do we fear and hope for in each of these undertakings? What terrors may live beyond the safely regimented sequences of scientific rectitude?

Sequential explanation This is an issue which Kelly elaborated most clearly in his essay on ‘Ontological acceleration’ (Kelly 1969d). It was one of the many aspects of his thinking to which I’d only given cursory attention. His psychology is, I think, a kind of ‘behaviourism’, but something very different from the kinds we have been accustomed to. He raised behaviour to a place of special importance in human affairs as our most sensitively creative means of opening up new awareness and questioning our understanding. Behaviour is ‘an expression of anticipation, as well as something to be anticipated’. That is to say, as we go about preparing for, precluding and preventing, we are expressing our undertakings in what we do, whether in visible or invisible ways. He realized that some events can only be properly understood along a dimension of time. Thus our lives are lived out in the one-thing-after-another queue of time. If we are to explain actions scientifically, we have to explain them in a ‘sequential’ way, indicating what leads on to what, what consequences follow from what preceding cir-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 cumstances. This is what he’s referring to as ‘sequential explanation’. He was, however, concerned to extend the notion of ‘sequential explanation’ far beyond how we have mostly considered it in psychological science. Here again he was shaking the familiar ground on which many still stand. Instead of viewing any action as a solid event which has to be taken just as it is, substantial, given, a matter of observable fact, he invites us to walk right round it and see it from other angles. He insists that we must ask what could have happened instead, what could we have done instead. He is concerned to light up any action from the rear and the side and in terms of other possible worlds that could have existed if some other act had been undertaken instead. ‘. . . human anticipation – the stuff that life is made of – unfolds its full meaning only when one is keenly appreciative of what might actually happen instead . . . in the rich context of all else that may be possible’ (Kelly 1969d: 7). 154 Understanding

In seeking to understand behaviour more fully, removing it from the realm of a dead and given reality, to being one act out of many others that might have been, Kelly draws attention to a number of different ways of questioning our acts of questioning. Thus, he stressed that what an act was denying or rejecting could be more focally important in understanding it than any direct attention to the event in itself. Many are now familiar with this aspect of his approach to ‘sequential explanation’ and know to attend to the ‘dread of ending in the gutter like his drunken father’ which may be what the successful, but unbearably stressed, businessman is expressing in his remorseless drive for success. What Kelly seems to be saying is that all our acts of anticipation are rhetorical rather than simple matters of fact. They are all in pursuit of some project as a way of preparing for, precluding or preventing other possibilities which could otherwise become real in our dealings with others. Much of the meaning in whatever is done is in what wasn’t imagined or was rejected or ruled out because of the fears or unsettlement that line of action was sensed as leading towards. Beyond this he drew attention to the need to understand any behaviour ‘in the context of relevance’. All our behaviour, all our construing, is part of a personal undertaking. But we often do not know, just by looking at what is being done, what ‘contexts of relevance’ are involved. Indeed, many different contexts of relevance are likely to be legitimately fitted round any particular action. The notion of ‘anticipation’ opens up a wide range of questions we can ask as to the possible undertakings which may be involved. Kelly suggests that in attending to the question of ‘relevance’ we may come to recognize that ‘the living history’ of a person is to be found in the ‘story of the questions’ he or she has enacted, rather than the conclusions he or she ‘has anchored in science or dogma’ (Kelly 1969d: 12). In trying to understand any action by seeking the undertakings of which it is an expression, we may often have to recognize that our undertakings are to prevent and preclude the possibility of their own existence being noticed by us or others. We can be as fully committed to ignorance and blindness as to knowledge and awareness. Sequential explanation goes beyond all of this. The meaning of an act cannot be more fully recognized till the ‘line of argument’, the form and manner of the argument within which it is located is recognized. A ‘line of argument’, a phrase Kelly used to clarify what he meant by construing, is not just something done by one person, but an engagement between different partners or opponents. In any line of argument, in any act of construing, each participant, each side, will be employing whatever array of rhetorical ploys they are capable of to establish the dominance of their claims or to achieve whatever undertakings they are committed to. The ‘sequences’ which have to be explained include the ploys and tactics of these debaters. They are not ‘fixed’ in any

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 closed or deterministic system of implications. What he is emphasizing in all this is the complexity of behaviour and its questioning possibilities in our lives. Through these means Kelly was trying to unsettle us and open possibilities which are often ruled out by our more matter of fact approach to behaviour and its explanation.

Acting in faith In the context of ‘sequential explanation’, Kelly is emphasizing something of the creative, unexpected powers we have available in behaviour. He was also indicating some of the questions we need to ask if we are to be more able to understand what we or others are up to. In this context he recognizes that our psychology must, ‘in the light of coming centuries, still be considered a psychology of the unknown – this, rather than A long term quest for understanding 155

a psychology that has been partly substantiated – and that knowledge, certainty, and truth all lie a considerable distance ahead’ (Kelly 1977: 15). In relation to this ‘unknown’ his concern is to act in faith, a faith that by systematic effort we can get a little closer to the way things are. He goes on to say that it is this faith ‘that distinguishes the psychology of the unknown from simple psychological agnosticism. And it is experience, sought in full cycle that is the implementation of the faith’ (p. 15). This issue of acting in faith is an important one for the kind of psychology Kelly was proposing. By acting in faith, Kelly didn’t mean that we should take someone else’s word and believe all sorts of daft things because they are stated with authority or handed down in some tradition, whether scientific or religious. Rather is he proposing an essential mode of coming to know personally. What he is drawing attention towards here is a strategy of anticipating events which is very different from what was being taught as ‘scientific method’ in his day. It may again be helpful to start from one of the dictionary meanings (the historical uses) of the word ‘understand’. In a direct way it derives from the notion of ‘standing under’ or ‘stepping under’. In this sense, to understand involves you in ‘stepping and standing under’ what you seek to know personally. You are becoming a pupil to the master of whatever event, person or circumstances you seek to know. You are opening yourself to be affected and influenced, moved and touched by what you seek to understand. If you go to the waterfall and step into it, stand under the icy force of its power, you are acting in such a way that you become available to be affected and influenced through all your senses. The prime method of inquiry which Kelly advocates involves the inquirer (the psychologist, person in the street or client in the consulting room) in recognizing that he or she has to change themselves first if they are to have any chance of understanding, of knowing personally. If you have to change yourself first, before you can know whatever lies ahead in the realm of unknown possibility, you are having to act in faith. What is being claimed is that you cannot understand if you do not stand under. You cannot understand if you stay separate, outside, far away, protected against any involvement till there is no longer a risk to yourself. If you are to learn to swim, you have to let go of the side and act in the faith that the water and your instructor will, somehow or other, sustain you. You can learn a lot about water and swimming from books, observations and measurements, but if you are to enter into a living relationship with swimming, know it personally rather than theoretically, you have to get into the water and let go of the side. Kelly makes this point in ‘Ontological acceleration’ (Kelly 1969d: 8). He says, ‘The very process of posing questions about (oneself) with deeds rather than words trans- forms the questioner, even before he (or she) is aware of any rewarding answers.’

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Kelly is proposing a psychology for living, rather than a psychology of observation and the control of others. In this kind of psychology, he is inevitably concerned with the endlessly-to-be-repeated importance of getting into the water and taking your feet off the bottom, acting in faith, in many different circumstances. He assumed that ‘life sized’ understanding comes about through our ‘involvement’ and ‘commitment’ rather than by distant observation. In his notion of experience, Kelly is outlining ways of standing under, of stepping into the onrush of events and doing something about them from there. You cannot know what it is to be gentle until you act in ways which allow you to feel what gentleness is and makes possible. In fixed role therapy, therefore, Kelly encourages the participant to dwell in the shape, manner, methods and ways of understanding of the imaginary person in the sketch. By dwelling in that imagined person, by involving oneself fully in what may 156 Understanding

become available through this new form of life, the person is being invited to change themselves first, to act in faith, to step away from their familiar self for the time being, perhaps never to return. This can be alarming and exciting. It is the stuff of faith and commitment. All of this seems to draw more fully from religious traditions than from our conventional notions of psychological science (though acting in faith is also, of course, an essential aspect of all creative science). What we are dealing with in this strategy of knowing is more akin to prayer and meditation than to the familiar hard-edged exter- nalities of the ‘experimental method’. In prayer there is an opening of oneself to what is beyond yourself, a willingness to be given over to new possibilities of knowing. There is an acting in faith, whereby the person may dwell imaginatively in their image or understanding of Christ (in the Chris- tian tradition) or in the intricate forms, colours and symbolic meanings of a sacred representation (within the Tibetan Buddhist, tantric tradition). In each case, the practitioner is seeking to change aspects of themselves first, by faith, in order that it may then become possible to go to the places of experience and understanding which cannot be reached if you remain where you normally are or as the kind of person you normally take yourself to be. What is recognized here, especially in the Tibetan Buddhist system, is that what you are opening yourself to and seeking to dwell within, is an aspect of your own mind, still to be more fully understood and realized.

Converse-ing In dwelling in the ‘other’ and then by acting in relation to the understandings/misunderstandings we have reached, we are engaging in conversation, the very ‘bread and butter’ of living. It may be worth remembering that one of the older meanings of the word ‘conversation’ is ‘the act of living in and amongst’. This older meaning again speaks of a strategy of knowing (still more familiar to anthropologists than to most psychologists), which involves going to where the ‘other’ lives and becoming a pupil to them as teacher, dwelling amongst them, stepping under their way of living so as to be in-formed by them and transformed, sometimes, in your own understandings. Kelly is recommending this kind of conversation. Here, however, I want to draw attention to a particular aspect of the conversation of personal knowing which Kelly was advocating. In the notion of ‘bipolarity’ and ‘contrast’, Kelly recognizes that whenever we act, we carry with us in what we do, the converse of everything we undertake. In PCP, all our understandings/misunderstandings are to be seen within the dimensional, argumentative, projects we are able to imagine and able to dare. Kelly’s is a psychology of the converse of everything we claim.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Much of this is reminiscent of a central Buddhist concern. The Buddha recognized that all human sense making is in terms of dualities, either/or. He suggested that it was because of this that human beings tend to be trapped in perplexities and confusions of many kinds. In Buddhist practice, however, the path towards enlightenment, or higher understanding, is said to be through practices which help a person to transcend the ordinary dualities of their undertakings. In this state, difficult to reach though it is, it is said that we are capable of entering a different manner of awareness, beyond either/ or. This seems to be a state of awareness in which it is possible to live ‘dimensionally’, beyond the arguments of opposites, recognizing these as both helpful and obstructive means which can be left behind (though still being necessary and useful in the particular engagements of daily life) when this wider manner of understanding is achieved. Such an aspiration, of transcending our dualities, is not at all at odds with the psychological perspective Kelly was describing. Certainly we have a long way to go before A long term quest for understanding 157

we are able to live lightly and ‘dimensionally’, rather than being caught and held in the oppositions we ordinarily use and are often abused by. We might not want to go in the Buddhist direction, but Kelly’s psychology takes us to the foothills of this possible spiritual or psychological journey. It speaks in terms which may make such a journey more recognizable and credible to many who might be suspicious of the wisdom of an unfamiliar and Eastern tradition.

Interrelatedness In relation to the principle of ‘sequential explanation’, Kelly is saying that a wider array of events than is usually considered needs to be included if a fuller understanding of what is going on is to be achieved. At present we most often attend to a narrow range of events as being interrelated with each other in significant ways, in the explanations we seek. The effects of this narrowness of attention are increasingly apparent as we are being pushed towards a more ecological perspective on many matters. Kelly makes it clear that he assumes a world which is ‘integral’, with the price of yak’s milk in Tibet being related (through very many convolutions of complex events) to everything else. His whole approach is concerned with the systematic ways, the interrelated ways, in which we come to understand or misunderstand events. He is concerned with systems, with what links with what, with what has implications for what, with how lines of argument link here with over there. As an example of this issue of ‘interrelatedness’, I’ll pay some attention to the dimension of ‘self/other’. Kelly does not take the notion of ‘self’ as central to his concerns about personal knowing or personal action. My impression is that awareness is much more central to Kelly’s perspective than ‘self’. ‘Self’ is seen as part of a strategy for anticipating events, sometimes being helpful and sometimes becoming a pattern of rigidity and a hindrance to understanding or change. Kelly poked fun at people (psychologists amongst them) who claimed that they could only ‘be themselves’. This notion of an ‘essential nature’ was not what he had in mind. By acting in faith, he saw it as both possible and necessary to transcend any particular way of identifying ‘self’. In all this I can also see a reflection of the Buddhist notion of the interrelatedness of all phenomena. What Buddhist theory implies is that everything is interrelated and implicated in everything else and that, therefore, nothing has any essential identity of its own. In this sense, all phenomena, like the ‘self’ for instance, are seen as being ‘empty’ of any essential nature which characterizes them in some unique manner. This ‘emptiness’ is not, however, a great ‘hollowness’, but a recognition that everything is ‘full’ of everything else. This sort of idea, quite central to Buddhist theory and practice, is attractively pre- Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 sented by the Vietnamese Zen Master, Thich Nhat Hanh in the following manner:–

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. ‘Interbeing’ is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix ‘inter-’ with the verb ‘to be’, we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are. If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. 158 Understanding

Even we cannot grow without sunshine. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became the bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist. Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. (Hanh 1988: 3–4)

The Buddhist concern is to come to recognize, in a full and personal way, that we have no ‘self’, no apparatus which is an essential castle of being. We are, instead, fully implicated in and dependent upon everything else and constituted by it all. Much of Buddhist psychology is then devoted to practices (both meditational and in terms of activities in daily living) which may allow anyone to come to know personally what this means in their experiencing of events, rather than in the head only. In Buddhist psychology, the belief is that this kind of practice helps to free practitioners from the supposedly narrow, distorting and pain-producing confinements of their more ordinary sense of ‘self’. Rather than adding to the idolatry of ‘self’, might it be that Kelly’s approach is at least potentially available as a psychology of interbeing, of the emptiness of all phenomena, or the fullness of everything with everything else. Might it be that he offers an unusual psychology in the West, one in which ‘self’ is recognized only because it is used as a common notion by which we both achieve certain cultural ends, while also precluding and preventing much that might otherwise be available to us?

Here and now Kelly’s theory is generally considered to be future-oriented. This is certainly how it seems, since he was keen to discourage us from supposing ourselves to be determined by the past, while encouraging us to recognize that we are always dealing with the unknown we are about to enter. I’d like to suggest that it may better be seen as a psychology of the here and now and of what we are up to in that location in psychological space/time. Kelly offers us, in his notion of ‘constructs’, places to stand on in our psychological life, places to move from and to return to, in order to achieve some bridges across psy- Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 chological space and time. Within the discipline of Rhetoric, these places are referred to as topics, which originally meant ‘places where riches and stores are kept’. In the preparation and presentation of a line of argument, the rhetor or speaker sought to establish central topics as places from which the campaign of his argument would be launched and from which the necessary ammunition and supplies for moving on would be drawn. As I’ve been saying quite often, Kelly seems to be concerned with ‘awareness’ as a basis for developing greater understanding of what we are up to and what is going on between us. While outlining many ways in which greater understanding may be achieved, he does not offer any direct guidance on the development of awareness. It is here that I think it may be useful to attend more clearly to that ‘place’ which is the ‘here and now’. A long term quest for understanding 159

Buddhist ideas and practices may be helpful to the Personal Construct Psychologist here, since Buddhism is much concerned with ‘awareness’ or, as it is often termed, ‘mindfulness’. What is stressed is that mindfulness is an activity undertaken in the present moment. You cannot be mindful in the past or the future, since one has gone and the other hasn’t arrived. The only place for awareness to be developed is in the present, in the intersection of time and space which we refer to as here and now. The present moment can be considered as both remarkably ephemeral, scarcely there before it is already past history, and continually with us, because wherever we are is again the present moment, here in this place and now in this moment of time. In this perspective, we are never anywhere other than the present moment, though that is not how we mostly experience our selves. Certainly we imagine ‘past’ and ‘future’, and may even spend most of our lives worrying about one or regretting the other. In this we may never notice that we are allowing the only time we have, the present moment, to be hijacked by these phantoms which are pretending to be ‘past’ or ‘future’, but are take-over bids by the ‘present’ in disguise. In this way we can fail to understand that we have to lay claim to the present and learn to distinguish this from images of possible futures, pretending already to be present and blocking up the present by their importunity. We should, perhaps, also become able to recognize that all feelings and concerns about the past are enactments in the present, seductive stories we tell ourselves repeatedly, which can prevent a clearer recognition of where we are and what is going on. Kelly emphasizes the fluid, changing nature of the psychological processes which constitute whatever we are. This flowing onwards may become especially apparent if we can take our place more clearly in the ‘here and now’, so that we are able to suspend our customary bridge building from past to future, and sense the coming into and going out of being of the events which populate our awareness. Our stories of the future and the past are ways of linking this with that and allowing us to create the illu- sion of stabilities where we might otherwise be carried in the ongoing flux. While such stories are most helpful in many ways, they can also become misleading traps. When this happens, it may be especially useful to be able to return to the refreshment of the here and the now. If we become more attentive to clearing this space and inhabiting it with quiet attention, we may become more aware of what we are up to, what is going on, how we are repeatedly losing ourselves in fears of supposed futures or using up this transient and continuing place with accounts of past events. In this we may become more able to articulate the geography of the present moment. We may become more aware of the movements of our own attention and the ways in which our, often unrecognized, undertakings keep causing us troubles we do not readily understand. In Buddhism, the texts which purport to recount the teachings of the Buddha are

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 called ‘Sutras’. One of these is specially concerned with this matter of living in the present. The first few lines may be worth quoting here:–

Do not pursue the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. The past no longer is. The future has not yet come. Looking deeply at life as it is, in the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom. (Hanh 1990) 160 Understanding

If, as I’m suggesting, Kelly was outlining a psychology of understanding based on awareness, then we may need to develop a clearer sense of being in the present, so that we can recognize and avoid the continuing take-over of the fluid moment with the fixed patterns of past or future stories. All our acts of anticipation – of preparing for, precluding and preventing – take place in the here and now. It is important to notice that ‘anticipation’ is as relevant in relation to present ideas of the past as to present ideas of the future. We can prepare for, preclude and prevent in relation to events of the past as readily as for supposed future happenings. But in all our anticipations we are acting in the present, even though we are imaginatively dwelling in images of past or future. A psychology of understanding will be considerably aided if we can open a recognizable ‘place’ for ourselves in the ‘circle of the present moment’, so that we can learn to recognize more clearly what we are up to and what is going on, where our attention is located and whether we are ‘pursuing the past’ or ‘losing ourselves in the future’. Just as practitioners in many other disciplines are finding, so it may be that Buddhist practices of mindfulness may be particularly helpful for the Personal Construct Psy- chologist in realizing some of his or her own personal and professional concerns.

What themes are involved here? The themes I want to draw attention to particularly, from what has been said, are the following:

1 Unless we become more explicitly aware of what we are up to and what follows from our choices and actions, then we are not going to develop our understandings of ourselves and others. Kelly seems to me to be offering the outline of a psychology of understandings/misunderstandings rather than a more familiar psychology of information and observation. In this context it may be useful to note that the literary critic, I.A. Richards in his influential book, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), sought to redefine the ancient discipline of Rhetoric as ‘the study of misunderstanding and its remedies’. Kelly’s concern is not with a ‘value free’ activity of observation, as if by a visitor from another planet, but with human conduct. He is concerned with how we live and how we can live more satisfactorily together. In this context, it is of vital importance to learn more of what leads to ‘good’ outcomes and what to ‘bad’. Of course, Kelly is not speaking here of some moralistic judgement, but is concerned with us getting on with our lives together in satisfactory ways, as circumstances change and new understandings and actions are required. He recognizes that what we take to be ‘good’ or ‘evil’ now is going to look very different in years to come. As

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 we learn to recognize more of what we are up to and come to undertake more of our interrelatedness with other people and circumstances, much of what we are blind to or regard as acceptable behaviour may yet be seen as unacceptably damaging. Kelly was not only concerned with our changing understandings as interesting cognitive activities, but with the development of wisdom. He seems to be concerned with how we may be more able to develop a fuller appreciation of human conduct in changing circumstances, make better choices and learn more of what is likely to follow from different kinds of undertakings. His way of speaking of this is to say that the major task for psychology is ‘the fullest possible understanding of the nature of good and evil’. 2 In all this I am suggesting that Personal Construct Psychology should be seen as a close cousin of those long term quests for understanding which are found in religious and moral traditions. Kelly was clearly most influenced by the Christian A long term quest for understanding 161

tradition. He was, as judged from his writing at least, no traditional believer. He was well aware of the dangers of dogmatism and the obscenities to which it so often leads. He was clearly aware of the ‘death of God’ movement in Christian theology and saw it, not as a statement of faithlessness but as a step towards a greater taking of responsibility by human beings for their own destinies. This theme, of the need for us to take more responsibility for what and how we know and choose not to know, was central to his psychology. It has a similar importance in the current, non-realist theology, which seeks to develop deeper understanding of the human undertakings which constitute religious life.

Rather than focusing only on the Christian tradition, I’ve chosen to give some emphasis to aspects of Buddhism. In doing this I’m not suggesting that Kelly’s psychology is Buddhist (certainly not that it is nothing but Buddhist) or that he was a Buddhist without knowing it. Such notions are of no interest to me. What I’m concerned with is to step beyond psychology’s continuing fear of the moral and religious. I think we should recognize that the Psychology of Personal Constructs can legitimately be seen in the family of religious disciplines, just as it is already seen to be in the tradition of scientific inquiry. Kelly is, I believe, offering us common ground at a meeting place of these two streams of inquiry where the exclusive boundaries which have so often separated disciplines (Rhetoric from Philosophy, Science from Art, Religion from Science, Buddhism from Christianity, Psychology from Religion) can be laid aside. We may then be able to attend to the ideas and methods of inquiry they employ, rather than rejecting them because they belong to modes of knowing which have been separated in more recent times. Kelly sums a lot of it up when he says:

. . . if you go ahead and involve yourself, rather than remaining alienated from the human struggle, if you strike out and implement your anticipations, if you dare to commit yourself, if you prepare to assess the outcomes as systematically as you can, and if you master the courage to abandon your favourite psychologisms and intellectualisms and reconstrue life altogether; well, you may not find that you guessed right, but you will stand a chance of transcending more freely those ‘obvious’ facts that now appear to determine your affairs, and you may just get a little closer to the truth that lies somewhere over the horizon. (Kelly 1977, p. 19)

Note 1 Mair, M. (1995) ‘A long term quest for understanding’, presented at XIth International

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Congress on Personal Construct Psychology, Barcelona, 3–7 July. CHAPTER 12

SEARCHING TO UNDERSTAND – ON BEING A PSYCHOLOGIST IN A CHANGING WORLD1

Introduction I feel deeply honoured to be invited to give this talk, honoured and nervous. After all, I’ve been out of psychology for many years and haven’t had any public connection with Personal Construct Psychology in that time. I don’t know what the current issues are in PCP, and it may be that what I will say has been said already, and said better. My main aim is to speak of a different mode of psychological inquiry from the familiar research methods concerned with establishing facts. This alternative mode of inquiry involves searching for understanding, for further meaning, rather than the moulding of new information. As I see it, searching for understanding is a very different way of being involved in psychology, demanding very different things of the inquirer and opening very different horizons of possibility. I will indicate some of the features and qualities of this approach, emphasizing search rather than research, understanding rather than fact finding. This alternative approach is concerned with different things. You don’t have to give anything up to consider, and even undertake, something of what I will be speaking about. You do have to include more of who you are, and who others are. You have to take more of yourself on board, and be willing to include aspects of human experience which are often sidelined or left out of standard approaches to psychological inquiry. Almost everything said here has its roots in aspects of George Kelly’s Psychology of Personal Constructs, though expressed in ways that speak of my interests and concerns, and in a different style from the one Kelly used.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 While Kelly expressed his remarkably original thinking in ways which were influenced by his mathematical and engineering interests, my approach has always been more informal, rooted in feeling and the riches of language, more ‘poetic’ rather than ‘technical’. As some of you will know, over the years I’ve been attracted to metaphor (Mair 1977b) as a major way in which we seek for new meanings, for opening up new avenues of inquiry. One metaphor in particular, that of the ‘self’ as if a ‘community of selves’ (Mair 1977a), has been important in my thinking and in my work as a therapist and teacher. That metaphor will appear again in this presentation. I was inspired by Kelly’s understanding of ‘role relations’ to become specially attentive to issues of communication, initially developing ‘a conversational model of psychological inquiry’. This later opened out into a much wider appreciation of ‘conversation’ as being of basic importance in psychological life. Searching to understand 163

This led on to an interest in rhetoric and imagery, language and imagination, feeling and awareness, story and ways of telling, questions as quests and journeys of inquiry that could span a life time or be undertaken within a few minutes. We’ll come back to some of these matters a little later on. The English philosopher, Mary Midgley (personal communication, 2010) says that ‘All our thinking proceeds by imaginative visions’. She goes on to say ‘These visions are not an extra. They’re not an ornament, a luxury to relax with once we have established the hard facts. They tell us which facts to notice and which to ignore. Essentially they shape our thought.’ When I first read Kelly’s (1955) Magnum Opus, in 1960, while I was a clinical psychology trainee in London, I was gripped by a tremendous sense of release and relief. Here at last were ideas that seemed worthy of a discipline with the aspiration of understanding human life. Many aspects of his work spoke powerfully to me and informed many years of work of my own. Others registered in a background way but continued to have a decisive, but largely unattended to, influence on my thinking. The ‘imaginative vision’ which has come to the fore now, to inform today’s talk, has deep roots in my own life as well as in Kelly’s experience and writing. It is an aspect that I’ve referred to before in a number of places, but which I now want to turn towards and face more directly. This ‘imaginative vision’ can be stated as follows:– Kelly’s approach to psychological inquiry is a close companion to ‘spiritual’ inquiry. This may be a ridiculous or shocking statement for some, and a welcome and exciting one for others. It will be very easy to misunderstand what I am trying to say here, and the idea may seem potentially damaging to both psychological and spiritual inquiry. Unlike any other major psychologist I know, Kelly (Maher 1969) had the temerity to speak of the myth of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden; of Jesus as a model of what a Personal Construct Psychologist would be like; of the major task for us being the fullest possible understanding of the nature of good and evil; of ‘God’ as being one of our greatest constructions of events; of the death of God as another way of speaking of human beings being ready to take responsibility for what is going on in our world, rather than allocating that responsibility to a supreme, supernatural being. In each of these statements, I think it is important to notice that Kelly was not bringing religion into psychology, but was looking through ancient stories and ideas from the Old and New Testaments to see some of the psychological understandings we could still derive from them. He was not trying to make psychology a branch of spirituality, but was having the courage and imaginative freedom to look at anything and everything for the psycho-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 logical understandings that could be derived. Different people find different inspirations in the Psychology of Personal Constructs. It is not just what Kelly said that matters here, it is also what we bring to the meeting with aspects of Kelly that are specially resonant for us. We enter into a personal relationship. There are different ‘Kellys’ for different people. A little later I will say something about my own background so that it will become clearer where I’m coming from in relation to what I come to claim. For the moment, I want to say that one of the things I recognized very early in my career was that you have to separate what we do from the particular belief system which gave that activity its initial life. I had found myself using a form of ‘free association’ and a colleague reprimanded me because I was not psychoanalytically qualified – so how could I use a psychoanalytic method?! 164 Understanding

I realized that the actions involved in ‘free association’ were open to anyone, even if you did not belong to that particular ‘club’ and would not be faithful to the meaning system its ‘members’ attached to the actions. So, anyone can do free association. Anyone can administer a repertory grid. Anyone can do mindfulness training. Anyone can speak to an assumed invisible being in times of trouble. You don’t have to be a psychoanalyst or a personal construct psychologist, a Bud- dhist or a Christian. Anyone can look through patterns of psychological inquiry to analogies with spiritual inquiry, and anyone can look through patterns of spiritual practice to see what pattern of psychological practice may be analogous. This is a very important place to begin. What has happened in the past is that standard psychology adopted an external/ objectivist standpoint because it was defining itself against anything philosophical or religious. In this way, large areas of psychological importance were ruled out of the realm of the psychological and the credible. We must allow ourselves more freedom of action than this old discriminative practice admitted. Speaking of invisible and insubstantial ‘others’, and entering into conversation with them, even asking for their help and guidance, is just what I’ve been advocating for years in the context of the metaphor of the community of selves. I’ve always seen this as a 100% psychological undertaking. At another time and in another context, this pattern of action could be seen as a 100% spiritual undertaking. Although I want to pose a radical question to psychology, I have no interest at all in ‘reducing’ the spiritual to the psychological (or vice versa), or replacing one with the other. The mode of inquiry I will speak of here is certainly ‘psychological’ but could also be seen as being in the lower foothills of the ‘spiritual’.

A little personal history Where do I come from and what (spiritually and psychologically) do I bring to a meeting with Kelly? I was born and brought up in the North East of Scotland, a country boy, before going to Secondary School and University in Aberdeen (and that was before going to London for my training as a Clinical Psychologist and then to work towards my PhD in London University). I think Kelly was a country boy too and was also brought up in a church-going

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 home like myself. In my case it was the Protestant, Church of Scotland which shaped much of my early life. My mother was the biggest influence here (my father was a churchman too, but was more influential and valued in other ways). She was a daughter of the manse. Her father was a minister in the Church of Scotland. Her brother became a missionary in India and then a minister in the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh. Two of his sons became missionaries and then ministers in the Church of Scotland. My mother’s sister and her husband became lay missionaries on a remote island off the west of Scotland. Their son became a minister in the Church of Scotland. Many of my parents’ friends were missionaries and ministers in the Church of Scotland. Perhaps you are beginning to get the idea! Not surprisingly, my mother hoped that I’d follow in this same line of business, though she never made that explicit or forced the issue. Searching to understand 165

As a boy, I quite liked some aspects of this possibility for my future life. I tried very hard to believe what was necessary, and respected many of the values of the people around me. I especially liked the idea of wearing fine robes and having a pulpit, raised up above other people, from which to express and explore ideas and opinions, though the idea of having to do that every week rather daunted me. However, in my later teens I had to recognize that I just couldn’t believe the religious dogmas and miracles involved. I couldn’t sing either, nor imagine having to lead the hymn singing in church and elsewhere. When I found I’d passed enough exams to go to University, I took Psychology, along with English and Latin, in my first year. Psychology seemed attractive because it had something to do with people, and because I hadn’t had to study it at school. After my first year, the Professor of Psychology, Rex Knight, invited me to consider doing an Honours Degree, and that was my direction decided. After four years of various aspects of scientific psychology, research design, statistics and other such delights, I went to do my Clinical Training in London. The Psychol- ogy favoured at the Maudsley Hospital was again of the ‘hard science’ variety, with another helping of statistics and research methodology, as well as lots of psychological measurement and the early excitements of Behaviour Therapy. Except that I didn’t actually find Behaviour Therapy very exciting and felt that much of what I was being taught was simplistic, often boring and conceptually ugly. I did enjoy aspects of this training, and had experienced a few sparks of psychological excitement, but not enough of them to build a life from. The biggest change came when I read George Kelly’s ideas and felt myself inspired with the possibility that psychology could become personal, and that my personal concerns, feelings, thoughts and preferences could yet find a place there. So I found that neither my early experiences of religion nor my first encounters with scientific psychology really ‘stuck’. I didn’t seem to resonate to either of these ‘worlds’, though a lot of what I’d experienced along the way was felt to be important too. I found that Kelly’s encouragement enabled me to begin to find my own way. Perhaps you can sense that I was ‘primed’ to hear some things more than others, and to respond to some suggestions more than others in what Kelly was offering.

A practical illustration Everything I want to say is based on experiences over many years now, in my experiences with patients in psychotherapy and in my own, life long, searching to understand more of who and where I am. What I’ve found helpful has been tested on very many occasions in my own and some other people’s experiences.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 This means it has passed some practical tests but it doesn’t mean that you will find what I say of use to you or of interest. You would have to test that out for yourself, if you wanted to find that. The approach of ‘searching to understand’ which I will speak of here, is complex and fluid, open to many different kinds of actions and engagements. All I can do here is to offer you one little, practical example of one small instance. This may still be of value in showing you some of the main aspects of this mode of inquiry, even if in a small way and in a particular context.

I was staying overnight in an hotel, far from home, before going to be one of the interviewers for a new post. There were three applicants on the shortlist for a senior post in a Psychological Therapies Department. Each applicant had marked strengths and certain limitations and the choice was going to have profound implications for 166 Understanding

the atmosphere, direction and development of the place. One of the candidates had a distinguished background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, another was a cognitive behaviour therapist and the third was more eclectic and wide ranging in her psychotherapeutic background. The whisper was that the psychoanalytic applicant was the betting favourite and this contributed to my unease. I certainly didn’t want to be unfair to him, but I have a history of disquiet about the way in which some who are deeply rooted in the psychoanalytic tradition can be arrogant and narrowly rigid in their understanding of, and openness to, other approaches. As I sat in the hotel foyer after breakfast, waiting for the taxi to take me to the interviews, I was aware of feeling tense, uneasy, confused, unsettled. As I often do, I took out a note book to reflect a little on who was going to the interviews as me. First of all, I identified the main ‘selves’ who seemed to be alive and active in me as my awareness was shaped by the uncertainties of the moment. I gave simple names to each, to catch their most obvious characteristics. Almost immediately I was aware of the one who was most in evidence, having been left to cope as best he could. I called him ‘Anxious’. Then there was another, right in my face, ‘The Rebel Teenager’. After them came ‘The Reformer’, ‘Mr. Fair Minded’ and ‘Mr. Let’s get this done with’. I paused with each of them to get some sense of what each cared about, valued and was concerned about in the present situation. Anxious was insecure, uneasy, nervous. He was feeling inadequate to the task that was facing us, even a bit overawed by the situation and the distinguished interviewees (and the political implications and pressures which he felt surrounded their claims). He was tight and closed. The Rebel Teenager was immediately there to be heard, loud and clear. He wanted to bash the establishment bastard. ‘Make him squirm or let him feel he is being successful and then dump him!’ was his vigorous advice. The Reformer was concerned with wider and longer term issues. He wanted to help towards enabling fairer and more open ways to live in and develop psychotherapy. He wanted to chart a different and more wide angled approach than any of the ‘schools’ seemed to offer. He recognized that if he was to put his concern into action he would, in a quiet and gentle way, be taking on the ‘establishment’. His words of advice were ‘Be faithful to your values.’

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Mr. Fair Minded wanted to see and value the strengths of each candidate and wanted to make the interviews a good and constructive experience for all those taking part. But he also wanted to attend to the needs of the world and of the discipline of psychotherapy in a broader way than was often done. Mr. Let’s get this done with said ‘Let it go, make the best choice you can and then leave those involved to get on with it. You’ve done what you can, but they (the “establishment”) will always win in the end, so let it be.’ Using the Community of Selves idea in this way was familiar to me, having been practising it, in many different ways, for many years by that particular morning. And how did it feel? Did it feel useful? Quite certainly it did. Searching to understand 167

I was shocked by the forceful presence, the outspoken honesty, of The Rebel Teen- ager. He was certainly expressing a strong thread that I had not fully recognized in my earlier confusion. I couldn’t help but laugh at his ‘no nonsense’ approach. I was grateful to Mr. Fair Minded, for the balance which he brought and the sense of being so trustworthy. In that situation where I was shrinking under the imagined pressures of expectation in the outside world, The Reformer reminded me, in this public and politically charged situation, of the importance of being true to your values and aspirations if you possibly can. Mr. Let’s get this done with spoke the other side of that coin, voicing a familiar, already defeated, position of the underdog. I valued the fact that he stated that so clearly. Anxious had so obviously been present feeling that he was being left with the whole responsibility in his lap, as the others initially remained in the shadows, mostly out of reach. I got a strong sense of the powerful energy of The Rebel Teenager, the quiet passion of The Reformer, the safe pair of hands of Mr. Fair Minded, and the worldly practicality of Mr. Let’s get this done with. All these energies seemed useful and had their relevance. I immediately asked Mr. Fair Minded to be the Chairperson of my ‘team’ for this occasion. I asked him to draw on the vigorous anger of The Teenage Rebel, if that was needed, and on the vision of The Reformer too. I wanted us all to recognize that it was, as Mr. Let’s get this done with was saying, a job to be done. We would do it as well as we could and then let it go. Anxious, by now much relieved, was also a valuable member of the team since he is always so sensitively open to the undercurrents and hidden threats in situations like this. He could also be helpful to Mr. Fair Minded. As the taxi came, I felt stronger, more confident, with more understanding of who we were as a ‘team’ going to this interview situation. We had identified each other. Each had had his say and been listened to. The strengths of each were to be included and deployed. There was no longer a tugging in this direction and that, but a sense of common purpose. The interviews went well. The candidates presented themselves clearly and strongly and in the end the decision was on a knife edge between two of the candidates. The

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Chairman of the panel summed up, recognizing the balance of strengths and limitations of each contender. He brought us all towards a point of decision, indicating that we were tipping towards one over the other, tipping towards ‘the betting favourite’ because of some of the intellectual achievements of this person. And then I was especially grateful to have spoken with my ‘team’ beforehand because I could see so clearly that a logical decision, based on intellectual achievement, a decision of the head only, could just favour this candidate. However, if head and heart were combined, if values and qualities of presence were to be included, I could see that an argument was needed for the other candidate. Within moments, the values and hopes of others on the interview panel had been awoken. They had recognized in themselves a desire to take a wider and more balanced view, and a unanimous decision was made in favour of the other candidate. 168 Understanding

As we go along I’ll refer back to this illustration as a practical point of reference, which we can all share, to highlight the kinds of activities and experiences I’m talking about.

Searching and understanding What I want to do here is to reflect on both the ideas of ‘searching’ and ‘understanding’ to try to bring them before us more clearly. Both of these are ideas that have a central place in Kelly’s writing, though I haven’t approached them in quite the ways that Kelly did.

Searching It seems to me that my whole professional life has been about ‘searching’ for a psychological world in which I could live and work, rather than being deformed, depleted and diminished by much that I found around me. Although I’ve done some ‘research’ in the forms we generally recognize, it has been more basic ‘searching’ that has defined my life. While a vast amount has been written on research, almost nothing has been said about the more basic activity of searching for places to begin, for something of a world in which to live and work. It seemed to be accepted in psychology that you would do research. Nobody ever suggested that I would need to search for who and where I was and reach towards some other way of making enough sense to sustain a life. I was like many others, I’m sure, having to find my own way. Kelly’s psychology seems to be all about questions. Not little verbal questions that are asked for the sake of asking, but questions which give shape to a life. Our behaviour, everything we do, physically or imaginatively, is seen by Kelly as an asking, an act of inquiry. Some questions are quick and easy. Some are tangled into the warp and woof of who you are and need much longer to find and follow. These questions are better understood as quests, journeys, searching, undertaken, sometimes, over a long time, taking you through difficult and dangerous places, in pursuit of some precious goal. This goal is likely to be only dimly sensed, not seen with any clarity till you are well down whatever paths have to be walked into being. What is involved in searching? It is about following what you sense and feel, but do not yet know clearly what that is. It is about entering what is still unknown, sensed but still out of reach. It is about giving form to feeling and coming to know more of what you seek and are involved within. It is about conjuring into ‘reality’ ways of saying and seeing something of what has, till then, been intangible and unimaginable. It is about groping for what is still beyond what you know in any clear way. It is

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 about lowering yourself into the ‘soup’ of your circumstances (which includes who and where you are) so as to body forth a sense of what you are shaped by and still unable to engage with. A psychology of questions or quests is going to be different from a psychology of answers. A psychology of quest is a journey in the dark, towards what is not known and yet somehow sensed. It is a journeying into the unknown. It is a search for a new coherence, a new way of seeing. It is about finding and making places to live and developing ways to live in them, rather than about pinning down the credentials of claims, in a world already assumed and being insisted upon. What else does searching involve? It seems to me to involve staying with uncertainty, guilt, uneasiness, unsettledness (not ‘treating’ it as pathology or running away from it). Searching to understand 169

It may involve searching to say. Scribbling, writing, conjuring into being in expres- sive ways. Allowing and encouraging many voices. Finding ways to let those who have been silenced, speak. It involves reaching further on, without being able to see clearly what you are up to, going by feel and sense (as well as by knowledge of many kinds). It involves putting possibilities to the test of experience, in conversation, for yourself and others. It may involve undertaking an often tortuous journey from place to place, from topic to topic, each being relevant to what is not yet possible (though it is somehow known). It involves returning, again and again, to where you are now (Be personal! Begin again!). What matters is already here, if only you can find and say it. It involves practising ‘seeing’ with new eyes, ‘feeling’ with new fingers. Developing finer senses in words and tones and images and in the webs of meanings by which we live, even though we cannot point to where they are. Searching involves being a detective, a hunter, a pupil, a traveller, as well as being a tester out of practical implications of what is becoming clear. You have to collect clues and evidence, hints and confirmations of many kinds (including a sense of beauty, rightness of movement and sweetness of form). My searching is not going to be the same as your searching, though I’m sure it will have many similarities in form. My experiences of searching are not going to be the same as for others, but I’m sure something of what I say will resonate in the experience of some others too. In my little story of going to the interview, a brief journey of ‘searching’ is made manifest. On this particular occasion the search for more understanding of which aspects of myself were to the fore and going to be involved in the interviews lasted for only about fifteen minutes. Other searches can last a lot longer, even for a whole life. I opened my awareness to invite the inclusion of other ‘selves’, and was immediately rewarded with five presences that I hadn’t yet been aware of in that situation. My search for understanding was underway, but still had further to go to become more fully meaningful.

Understanding Kelly draws attention to understanding in many different places. He wrote of the ‘long, long quest for understanding’. He suggested that human beings have, on the whole, chosen to live by ‘understanding’, rather than by ‘authority’ or ‘rules’. He also makes a big point of saying that we won’t get anywhere in psychology unless we get close to people and engage ourselves deeply with them, entering into the maelstrom of human

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 affairs, using all our imagination, courage and endurance to feel for what is going on around and through us. His psychology includes the establishing of facts, but most of what he says is about how we can go about the process of understanding, of ‘standing under’ so that we can experience more fully and from the midst of events, rather than from the sidelines where we can observe from afar. This older sense of ‘understanding’ as involving ‘going to the place and standing under’ opens us to more than intellectual appreciation. What he is suggesting is something more bodily, involving us psychologically, to be sure, but also morally, physically and spiritually. Just as the philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi (1958) speaks of ‘indwelling’ and then ‘breaking out’ from profound personal involvement, so Kelly insists on us entering into very different relationships from the impersonal and attenu- ated observer position of the ‘standard’ psychological scientist. 170 Understanding

Elsewhere (Mair 1989b) I tried to encapsulate something of this approach to understanding in a few short lines (p. 157).

Understanding requires putting yourself in a position to be taught by to learn from to experience to be affected and changed to be humble to stand under Not to be aloof different superior separate high up out of reach remote professionally untouchable To understand is to be drenched and washed and flowed over by It is to take the form of the other to give your form away and in yourself to assume the form of the other so that you can be informed thereby It is to become a pupil It is to care enough to give the other power

Most standard psychology has been about the accumulation of more information,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 more facts and supposed facts. Kelly spoke early on of the tendency to build up piles of ‘nuggets’ of information, which he saw could be swept aside by the development of new perspectives of understanding. Kelly’s is not a ‘natural science’ type of psychology but more like a ‘psychology for living’, a psychology for engaging in living a life. It is not primarily a psychology for building up external evidence of this or that but of ways of engaging in the ongoing search for personal understanding. This is a different psychology in that it is about changing the nature and qualities of the inquirer before new understanding can become available. It is about the way in which personal inquiry changes who and how we are. We have often to change qualities and approaches of our own if we are to gain any new understanding at all. It is about entering a very different relationship with the other, and with knowing itself. Searching to understand 171

To come to understand more of the ‘other’ cannot happen though aggression, disdain or a sense of superiority. It may come through allowing space, safety and kindness. When you inquire of another, you have to be concerned with how you ‘ask of’ the other, not just what you ‘ask about’ them. What this reaches towards is the idea that how we are and who we are, between our selves and in relation to others, makes all sorts of differences to what we can understand and come to know. This is something that is mostly obscured and ignored when large scale studies are undertaken to find out about people. Kelly’s kind of psychology edges towards a concern with personal development in both kindness and courtesy, if we are to come to know more than a little of how and who other beings are. Returning to the illustration of going to the interview, I had to move on from identifying some of the ‘selves’ who were alive in the moment and take the crucial step of ‘going to the place’ where each one was and ‘standing under’ each in turn. This ‘standing under’ was in order to inhabit each with feeling and imagination so as to allow something of each to begin to become more available. Each was then invited to say something about who they were and what they were concerned about in this particular practical, social, situation. In this process, I was surprised and reassured. It became possible to allow each energy to have a place and a value, while inviting an arrangement whereby each was part of a team under the guidance of the most even handed and trustworthy. This process of searching for understanding not only changed me in various ways in the journey itself, but allowed further changes as what had been found was used to approach the forthcoming meeting in a more coherent and clear headed way.

Some features of ‘searching to understand’ The mode of psychological inquiry that I’m identifying by the activities of ‘searching’ and ‘understanding’, has a number of features which distinguish it from standard psychological research. I’ll mention only three.

Finding a voice This mode of inquiry involves personal development by the inquirer, so that you become capable of moving towards understanding and of undertaking the journey of searching that is involved. Kelly states that ‘Individuals differ in their constructions of events’, in their ways of making sense of themselves and their worlds. Beyond this, he suggests that each person is engaged in ‘elaborating’ their ways of understanding in the ‘choices’ they make in their lives. If we are to search for understanding, we have to attend to at least the following

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 issues. We will have to change some of the qualities of our awareness before we can ‘stand under’ any person or place that is different from where and how we normally stand. If we take the next steps and actually allow ourselves to dwell in and be ‘washed over by’ somewhere or someone very different from our usual places and manners, then we will, to a greater or lesser degree, be affected by the experiences involved. By absorbing and reflecting on these experiences the inquirer is edging towards a different quality of understanding from before, and this may involve undertaking different ‘voices’. Let us see how these points can be sensed in relation to the illustration involving my experience in going to the interview. I started out mostly in the position of the Anxious side of my ‘community of selves’. I felt so uncertain that it seemed necessary to find out who else was going to the interview. 172 Understanding

I was immediately made aware of the brash, forceful energy of the Rebel Teenager. This really surprised me and even shocked me. This ‘self’ had no obvious self doubt and was eager to get in there and put the boot in, living out his gut feeling about the beliefs of one of the candidates. He seemed to have no particular interest in, or knowledge about the others. His view was emphatic, aggressive and narrow. It was obvious that this way of going about the interview situation was quite unac- ceptable, but it was important to be made aware that this youthful knee-jerk reaction was lurking nearby and quite ready to snap into action if given half a chance. His manner of being was completely different from the Anxious self who had been most in evidence. Each of the others was different too. The Reformer was calmer and had a more thought out approach. He had an overarching belief system that would lead him in one direction rather than another. The next figure to appear was Mr. Fair Minded. He was a calm presence. He hadn’t made up his mind about the outcome and was committed to hearing all the evidence for each candidate. He seemed to be secure in his approach of valuing even handed- ness. He carried a sense of authority and of reason. Finally there was Mr. Let’s get this done with. He had a world weary feel about him. His hopes had been thwarted too often. He was willing to do what he could, while being resigned to the probability that what he wanted would not come to pass. He had a practical approach, willing to do his best but without hope that he would have much influence. In seeking to understand each of these selves a bit more, I had to become more like each one as I sought to feel myself into their concerns, qualities and beliefs. Even before I began to sense each one more fully, I had to become more like each in turn. In doing this I was then able, to some extent, to sense the energies and qualities of each. I decided to ask Mr. Fair Minded to be the leader of that part of my wider community that was to be involved in the interviews. He was to ensure that everything was listened to and evaluated. He was to listen to the promptings of the others, and to bring in their concerns, as well as their qualities and energies, as seemed necessary in the actual situation. In reflecting on each of these five selves, and this new arrangement, my anxieties were very much allayed and there was a sense of order and purpose in my community as we headed for the taxi and the interview hall. I felt more calm and confident because I’d come to understand who was involved and how each of them felt and was likely to engage. In the fraught situation of the interview, as the knife-edge choice was offered by the chairman, I was able to scan the concerns of each and see that there was more to be taken into account than just a logical overview of intellectual achievements. Finding my own voice involved bringing forth and recognizing the different ‘voices’ that all wanted to be heard. In coming to be more fully who we are capable of being,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 we have often to notice, allow and undertake the many voices within the voice, and draw them into a common purpose. By giving voice to the concerns that I was able to articulate, each of the other members of the interview panel seemed also to find that the slightly less obvious choice had more claim to their consideration than the summing up had allowed them to grasp. There was no doubt at all that this moment of speaking, with balance, thoughtfulness and energy was decisive in enabling the selection committee to come to an enthusiastic and unanimous choice.

Living in conversation Both my engagement with patients in psychotherapy and Kelly’s idea of ‘role relations’ led me to see the central importance of conversation. Searching to understand 173

As I entered into conversation with one patient after another, week after week, I recognized that some of our conversations were nourishing for patients and some were more arid and lifeless. I began asking myself what ‘conversation’ was and how it could be understood by way of different metaphors. I went to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, and found that ‘conversation’ had a number of meanings, emerging at different stages in the history of the language. One meaning was, of course, to do with ‘speaking together’. An older one defined conversation as ‘the act of living in and among’. Both of these meanings seemed helpful. Clearly what I was talking of did arise in speaking together with someone. The older meaning excited me most. This was saying exactly what I was experiencing. In speaking together we were becoming involved in acts of living in and among, inhabiting places which increasingly felt like environments where ways and qualities of life were being undertaken. I realized that we are never separate and quite alone, standing over against a world which is out there and quite different from ourselves. We are always in relationship and even when we are alone we are always involved in many kinds of meeting, in many modes of conversation. I began to realize that we are each born into multiple, ongoing conversations of our place and time. Many conversations are well underway when we are born and many others begin as we grow. Some of these conversations go on for centuries, while others are much more short term. Some conversations are all around us, shaping us from afar, while others are more local and intimately related to us. Some conversations become ‘private’ and ‘internal’ while still being powerfully influential in the ‘public’ and ‘outer’ world. We are criss crossed by conversations of many kinds. We are held and constituted in the warp and woof of conversation. We are woven together by conversations which bring some coherence, and fragmented by those that draw us in contradictory directions. Most of what goes on in the habitats of conversation is not clear cut and separated into sharply defined segments of meaning. We are in the realm of feeling, of acts of feeling. As we grope around us in the dark, we reach out to touch what is there. Those acts of feeling allow us to experience something of what we meet. We have to feel for what is going on, for where we are and for who is inhabiting this particular environment. We also have to become more imaginatively flexible in how we speak what we feel into shareable forms, most often in words, but also in other ways (in pictures, performances, buildings and other kinds of structures). Some of these issues are illustrated in going to the interview. When I turned towards them, there were immediately a number of recognizable

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 ‘persons’ involved. Initially they created a cacophony of conflicting concerns. Each had impulses towards different outcomes. All had significant implications for the real world encounter which was anticipated. The metaphor of different ‘selves’ gives a way of making some sense and order of what would otherwise be a confusion of contradictions. This metaphor is a heuristic device to find the many ‘voices’ within the voice, something of the variety of concerns that were alive but unnoticed within the situation. By allowing the appearance of the different presences within my sensing of the whole situation, each could be recognized and related to, one by one, so that they could be engaged with, included and drawn into a pattern of chosen activity, rather than remaining a tangle of disparate energies. In this case, where there were no serious conflicts between the different ‘selves’, it was possible to identify a useful social arrangement with Mr. Fair Minded becoming 174 Understanding

the central figure. The others could then contribute what each of them could to the pattern of meeting in the interview situation. As in every situation there was a lot going on which was both out of sight and out of mind. Some of what is felt to be going on can become available as we ‘lower ourselves’ into the pattern of feeling involved.

Relational knowing Every person is different. Every person is composed in relationships with others. Every person consists in a multiplicity of relationships, a conversational world. Every relationship is different. Every act of knowing arises in the midst of many relationships. Each relationship has different qualities. These qualities are mixed in different ways in every relationship. What we see or come to know is some version of the kinds and qualities of our relationships. What you see and feel is different from what I see and feel, even though we might categorize the events in similar ways. Most of what passes between us is mostly ignored. We have given little time to imagining what is involved in the relationships through which we come to know and understand. We are not trained in relational knowing. Instead, more often than not, we are trained in ‘scientific’ psychology, to remain impersonal, separate, out of reach. We are trained to ignore the intricate relationships that are always involved in any kind of inquiry. In searching to understand, on the other hand, we are inevitably involved in recognizing and entering into many of the relationships we would otherwise be unaware of and would keep well away from. All knowing is undertaken in relationships. There is always a social psychology of inquiry, whether in the formal psychological experiment or in the meeting of therapist and client. In all knowing something of who you are is always involved in what and how you come to know. Neither perception nor any other aspect of knowing is free of the flavours of the perceiver, the knower – as well as of what is becoming known. The qualities and manner of the knower’s relationship to who or what is to be known are always implicated. In what I am calling relational knowing there is more than this. The nature of the relationship becomes the very means by which aspects of what is going on can be brought into view and become the very stuff by which more can become available to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 awareness than would otherwise be the case. Relational knowing is to do with attending to the ‘spirit’ or ‘qualities’ of what is going on between and among those involved. It involves the knower in opening themselves in a holistic way to the felt situation. It involves seeking to know in a whole way, overall, rather than by analyzing and dissecting this or that aspect. Relational knowing changes us. In opening ourselves to our relationship with the other we are allowing ourselves to be infiltrated, infected and, to some extent, changed by the other. In the illustrative example of going to the interview, relationships of many kinds are undertaken. I undertook a holistic ‘feeling for’ the situation I was involved within. Very often this results in an image floating to mind to give some sense of the various forces and forms involved between us. In this particular instance, what immediately Searching to understand 175

emerged was a listing of characters who had some part in the whole drama. These characters all emerged in an immediate way, as if waiting in the wings, ready to express their individual concerns. They didn’t appear as a result of a process of careful thinking and discrimination, picking out each as a separated entity. They appeared all together, part of a whole sensing of the relationship. What I was doing was allowing myself to become open and ready to feel for what was in and around me, for the whole situation I found myself involved within, for this whole complexity of fears and flavours. Each of these ‘selves’ who appeared were parts of the whole, and each were also ‘wholes’ in themselves. The ‘spirit’ or qualities of each could be felt for in the same holistic manner as allowed the full cast of characters to emerge. All of this pattern of interrelationships was contained within the sensing of the whole relationship. In allowing the opening out of what was between and among us, some of the complexities of the overall relationship were revealed and undertaken. These were not ‘parts’ seen in isolation, or separated from, the whole situation. They were ‘parts’ or ‘selves’ experienced as ‘wholes’ within the greater ‘whole’ of the entire situation, which included myself. In this mode of psychological inquiry, which involves searching to understand, relational knowing is central. This is knowing as living personal experiencing, feeling our way, using all of ourselves to attend to the whole situation in which we are engaged. This kind of knowing is, of course, very important in psychotherapy, and has always been involved in spiritual awareness and inquiry. I want here to remind us of its importance for psychological inquiry too.

So what is this mode of inquiry about? x It seems to bring people more fully into who they are, what they feel and what they know – even though they do not initially know they know it. x It opens up something of their beauty, mystery and hidden wisdom and offers experiences which are often rich and relevant. x It is a way of engaging with darkness and struggle, lostness and search. x It is portable and flexible rather than being formal, statistical and cumbersome. x It is magical, imaginative, colourful, creative, moving and often transforming in smaller – or larger measures. x It makes manifest qualities of awareness that are beyond what you might readily be aware of or have available. x It offers something of an ‘education in feeling’ and in giving form to feeling. x It provides experiences of the bodily sensuousness of language and the many ways

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 in which language opens and closes awareness. x It can reset the direction of a life. x It gives you places and procedures to return to when everything is lost and needs to be engaged with once again.

This approach to inquiry is never going to win a popular following. It does not fit into the mass production of facts which our current educational and training systems demand. It is unlikely to reach out to those who think that personal development is unnecessary in relation to psychological inquiry. What I’m suggesting is on the overlap of psychological and spiritual inquiry rather than in the heartland of traditional, scientific psychology. In reflecting on this mode of inquiry it is worth remembering Kelly’s question as to what psychology and science may yet become? 176 Understanding

There is here a journey of transforming suffering, fears and failures into gentle restraint and hard earned respect, not the easy victories of power and brutality. What I’m suggesting is a psychological basis for the development of sensibilities and levels of awareness, as well as qualities of gentleness, consideration and kindness in inquiry. These are concerns that might otherwise be thought to be the preserve of spiritual inquiry alone. The kind of ‘understanding’ I’m involved with is not primarily about detailed explanations but to do with experiencing and being changed by that experience. This is a mode of contemplative inquiry, not a process of analysis, criticism, interpretation or description from afar. It is akin to entering with imagination and feeling into a work of art or a sacred object. This mode of inquiry involves inhabiting many relationships, between and among who and where and how we are.

On being a psychologist in a changing world What ‘searching to understand’ may offer is the possibility of a ‘two handed’ psychology. With one hand we will be establishing necessary facts and reliable information. With the other hand we will be feeling our way towards personal understandings and personal development. This other mode of inquiry is not instead of the approach of ‘standard’ psychology, but there to give depth, colour, qualities and body. To be a psychologist in a rapidly changing world, we may need both ‘hands’, not just one, or we may shrink into being passionless technicians, with no vision of other possibilities. This alternative side is almost the opposite of what so much in our society, and in psychology, is pushing towards. Because of that it may be specially important. What will be involved if we take this ‘two handed’ approach on board is a significant widening of our education as psychologists, becoming involved in art and poetry, story telling and quests for personal knowing, as well as the production of reliable facts and the testing of effective outcomes. What is clear to me is that there is still plenty of inspiration to be found in Kelly’s approach to psychology, a psychology that has yet to reach fulfillment. What may be needed is that we bring our own histories and concerns to bear so that the meeting between ourselves and Kelly speaks more of what we need personally as we engage in a rapidly changing world. For myself, this meeting has led me towards a search for understanding in which psychological and spiritual inquiry can be seen as close cousins to each other. In this, it is not just knowledge as information that is important, but understanding as a way of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 opening ourselves to more of who we are and what we are involved within. It is a psychology of relational knowing in which who we are and how we engage in meeting may move us a step further towards gentleness and kindness along the way.

Note 1 Keynote address at 10th Conference of European Personal Construct Association, Belgrade, Serbia, 9–12 April, 2010; originally published as Mair, M. (2011) ‘Searching to understand: on being a psychologist in a changing world’, in D. Stojnov, V. Džinovic´, J. Pavlovic´ and M. Frances (eds) Personal Construct Psychology in an Accelerating World, Belgrade: Serbian Constructivist Association/EPCA Publications, and reprinted by permission of Dusan Stojnov. CHAPTER 13

ENCHANTING PSYCHOLOGY: THE POETRY OF PERSONAL INQUIRY1

Introduction In what follows, I will focus on “personal” inquiry, on its “poetry” and how that may “enchant” our understanding. What I want to say is very much a personal story, but it is concerned with the elaboration of public psychology or of what we might mean when we talk of psychological inquiry. What I want to suggest are two different modes of psychological inquiry. The first is almost explicit in Kelly’s writing. This mode involves searching for understanding rather than researching to establish facts. The second involves two ways of psychological seeing, one involving what I’m calling “enchantment” (or the marriage of feeling and imagination) and the other resting on conventional “objectivity.” Something like this view is hinted at in Kelly’s writing, though not developed. I must stress here that I’m not approaching these issues in the spirit of either/or. It’s not a matter of going for understanding rather than information, or of choosing enchanted seeing over conventional seeing. Both are important.

Introducing my terms In my title are the terms “enchanting,” “poetry” and “personal.” I need to say a little about each of these. By “poetry” I don’t mean short lines on a page which may or may not rhyme. I’m referring to an approach to living which involves imaginative fluency, rather than conventional solidity. I’m referring to being able to hear with new ears, see with fresh eyes and becoming able to speak with imaginative directness, telling it like it feels and is Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 right now, not in terms of hack phrases or conventional slogans. In referring to “enchantment,” I don’t mean being put under a magic spell by a witch or wizard. I mean recognizing that consciousness and life can be raised to a different level, filled with new meaning, full of delight, beauty and poetry. Our lives, in this sense, are enchanted when we are touched by beauty, by the inflow of new meaning so that we are able to see and feel beyond the obvious and the objectively given, to what may be beyond and through what is immediately present. In speaking of “personal” inquiry I’m referring to the very heart of what I want to say. Kelly’s idea of a “personal” psychology really captured my imagination, enchanted me, by raising my awareness to a new level. As I see it, to speak “personally” is not just to speak as an individual, as a single, breathing body. It is to speak from where and how you are rooted in and shaped by your culture, place and time. 178 Understanding

“Persons” are not just individuals, since we become “persons” by being shaped and composed in the ways of language and culture, history and geography. We become a certain kind of being at the intersection of our bodily inheritance and the society that inducts us into what it considers a person to be. Thus when we speak “personally” we are, to some degree, speaking from within the warp and woof of our place and time, as well as our social circumstances. If we learn to lower ourselves into the qualities of our awareness, rather than just reacting with currently conventional stock phrases, we can sometimes speak more than we know, speak for others as well as ourselves. To engage in “personal” inquiry is to give effort and attention to finding your own voice, rather than falling in line behind someone else’s band wagon of the moment. My impression is that many of us want to remain in hiding, out of the “firing line” of social disapproval. We tend to follow current trends, rather than give ourselves over to becoming what is possible for us, and perhaps for no one else. My main influence within psychology has certainly been George Kelly (1955; Maher 1969), though many others have contributed. Almost everything I will say here has been touched by his ideas. My sense of his spirit breathes through everything I’ve written, but I won’t tie what I now say to particular chapter and verse. But, following Kelly’s example, I will be exploring aspects of imagination and “as if” thinking; all our behaviours as questions or quests that have to be lived with our whole lives, rather than in thinking alone. I assume that we are forms of relationships and that everything we are aware of arises between and among us, rather than “inside” us. Kelly was, I think, largely concerned with “understanding” rather than with the manufacture of facts. His was a perspective which could be turned towards particular explorations of many different kinds. In seeking to understand, he made it clear that we had to get involved, enter into what we sought to know, rather than stand aloof and outside, looking on as objectifying observers.

A little personal, psychological history Entering psychology I was completely naive about Psychology when I first went to University in Aberdeen, in the far north east of Scotland, in the mid 1950s. Being ignorant of what to expect, I absorbed whatever I was taught about different aspects of Psychology as being the case. I didn’t imagine that I, or anyone that I knew, might have a role in challenging what Psychology was or could become. Rather than being about understanding myself and other people, the Psychology I was being taught seemed to be largely about statistics and experimental design, learn- Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 ing theories and the development of computers, physiology and perception, as well as personality theories which pigeonholed people in various ways. (This was happening just at the time when George Kelly, in a far away land, and unbeknown to me or any of my teachers, was publishing The Psychology of Personal Constructs). When I then went on to my Clinical Psychology training in London there was even more emphasis on research design and complex statistical methods, more direction towards objectifying fact finding and the early enthusiasms of Behaviour Therapy. I also got positive encouragement to steer away from the subjective, the projective and the imaginative. While there were many things I learned and enjoyed, I reached the end of my Clini- cal Training with the feeling that I was living in an intellectual and professional desert, Enchanting psychology 179

a hard place of dry bones. Very little provided me with nourishment. Many of the concepts and methods seemed simplistic and ugly. There was no feeling of beauty, fluidity, warmth and light. I had a blind and urgent sense that there must be more to Psychology than this. I was already committed to living and working within the discipline, but was desperate to reach towards some ways of being engaged which felt more personally and professionally rewarding.

Reading Kelly After my final clinical exams and before going on to my first job as a research assistant, I spent many days in the sunny veranda of the Psychology Department at the Maudsley Hospital, reading George Kelly’s two volumes. I was amazed by the beauty of Kelly’s writing and ideas. Their scope and grandeur, their coherence and challenging depth, their hints and allusions of more that could still be reached just over the horizon of my mind, delighted me. This was not a psychology full of facts but a range of ways of engaging and avoiding, undertaking and rejecting the possibilities of enlarging or minimizing meaning. Here was something quite new to me (and to the discipline of Psychology), a psychology “empty” of facts and data but fully concerned with “methods” of personal inquiry for undertaking different phases and aspects of making sense of our worlds. One of his biggest invitations for me was to accept the gift of myself, of my own life, as being relevant to whatever psychology could be. He didn’t seem to me to be inviting people to become Kellians but to become themselves. Here for me was the beginnings of a perspective on psychological inquiry that seemed to be rich and suitably complex, full of unknowns while making engagement with the unknown more possible than before.

A turning around For nine years after I qualified as a Clinical Psychologist, I learned to talk with and listen to patients in psychotherapy, while I continued to attend to what I found hard and ugly in much of the psychology around me. I watched and listened for hints of what seemed to enliven and bring me sparks of new life. Then one day, in July 1969 (just 41 years ago), as I was sitting quietly in my office, reading a chapter written by Gordon Allport, something changed. I knew for sure that something in me had moved to a new place. The rest of my life has involved many attempts to work out what had changed and how I could articulate something of what now seemed to make sense to me. The change did not show me what had changed, though I quickly realized it had to do with Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 knowing in relationship, rather than coming to know as separate individuals. Over the next months and years, other aspects became available to me (mostly as a result of a lot more hard work). Ideas of the basic importance of metaphor (Mair 1977b) in giving shape to new understanding; of the self “as if” a “community of selves” (Mair 1977a); of images and imagination as being means for opening new spaces for the mind to move (Mair 1979); of feeling as a way of knowing (Mair 1980); of poetry as being to do with imaginative flexibility in expressing and capturing new ideas (Mair 1989b); of story and different modes and conventions of story tellings as allowing us to see what we were up to in a wider perspective (Mair 1988, 1989c); of questions as quests, as something like spiritual journeys to be lived with all of our resources, rather than as puzzles to be solved by the intellect alone (Mair 2003); of imaginative writing as a means of psychological inquiry (Mair 2008). 180 Understanding

Something quite fundamental changed for me, though I didn’t see what that was or how to speak of it. However, instead of looking from a position of separation, shut out from what I sensed and needed, I was now in conversation with it. Instead of being trapped in the stories of others, which never seemed to fit me comfortably, I began to be able to speak for myself, tell my own tales.

A practical illustration I want to move now to something more particular and concrete, some common ground that we can all stand on together. Through metaphor, images and words we will be entering an imaginative world in which nothing is quite as it seems. In this place personal “reality” is in feeling, in felt engagements, not in the events described. What I want to do is to illustrate some of the main features of the psychological approach I’ve now been working with for many years. Of course I work with the “ordinary” world too and with ideas and methods from other perspectives, but what I’ll try to do here is to suggest something of the psychological “home” I’ve come to inhabit. What follows is a small section from a psychotherapy supervision session with Judith, a colleague from many years ago. Judith was quite experienced as a psychologist and psychotherapist but still felt she became too involved “almost in a compulsive way” with some patients. She was so very busy putting herself into a helpful role. Our meeting was taking place just after she’d had a difficult session with one patient of this kind. “You seem to be filling the space with thoughts” I say to her, as she adds one possibility after another to help me to understand. How does it feel, here and now? What are you feeling? I ask her. Aliveness, busyness, a quickness, jumping from one thing to another. What does that feel like? I’m not sure about “feeling,” “accounts for” comes to mind. I know that when I’m with a patient I feel I need to offer whatever I’ve understood. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 So maybe that’s part of “accounting” for me. The feeling I have then is that I might want to give everything up! Yea! It’s like an either/or. Either I give it my full attention, my energy, Or I/it means nothing. What feelings do you have about this either/or? It’s a bit scary, because so much of my identity is tied up in it. If I . . . (she is near to tears) . . . I’m not sure where to go with that. Enchanting psychology 181

It feels uncomfortable, in a very tight space. What impression do you have of that tight space? It’s like a box. (Note the transition to the “imaginative” world) Boxed up. What size is the box? It’s a box you can hold in two hands. It’s not heavy. It’s made of cardboard. The lid is at the top so you can open and close it quite easily. I feel I’m in the box. What does it feel like in there? A bit claustrophobic. A bit lonely, and dark. Can you let yourself be there in that claustrophobic, lonely, dark place? How does that feel? It feels I’ve been in here for quite some time without knowing it. The notion of the lid – it easily opens and closes – I can see as I’m looking at it, I could easily open it if I was outside – but I’m in it, and can’t see how to get out. What sense have you of the person/the being in the box? Very unhappy, not really nourished, or free, not really happy or spacious. What kind of being is this? A little person looks like me long hair and pony tail fourteen years old. How is she dressed? Slack trousers and top – blue trousers and sweater top – the colour red comes to mind. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Standing – plimsoles on – the type you wear at school for PE. Really just looking around – almost like not understanding where she is – what to do next. How do “you” (the fourteen year old) feel now? A bit lost – bewildered – sadness is coming over – not understanding what she’s done – that kind of thing. 182 Understanding

What might you have done? Displeasure from others? – No! – It’s not that! – It’s others not being happy. – That’s it! – anger – aggression all around outside of the box – something unpleasant. What feeling do “you” have about that? It’s about the adult world – parents, – masculine mainly. – It’s about a kind of madness. Say more? This ...... she’s in it ...... feeling all this stuff ...... anger and violence ...... and can’t get away from it . . . and can’t do anything to change it! Being in the box is like hiding from it, – or trying to. Speak for “her” I would like to be seen, noticed cared for. By? Parents, family (followed by silence) What’s going on there? It seems to be a conversation that needs to happen with the girl – me and father – and being punished for things I haven’t done. A conversation between “you” and father? Yes,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 – and all of us – for things we didn’t do – brothers and sisters. What do “you” want to say? The most important thing – It’s something like being asked to do too much – when not ready to do it – to carry so much – to deal with the madness – when I’m not able to do that – because of losing ...... feels like I’ve lost my own happiness and freedom Enchanting psychology 183

. . . because of having to engage in the suffering. What’s the most important thing “you” want to say to father? (He can’t hear you at the moment) As this girl – what I want to say is how unfair it all is, – and how damaging it feels. Being expected to do what? To take responsibility . . . For? . . . for the craziness, – to try and always make things better – and sort things out. How are “you” feeling in there now? A bit angry – frustrated. At? Just the feeling of being on my own with it, – not having an ally, – nobody noticing my own struggles. Can you now try to be the box? (Here the “enchantment” becomes more obvious) Yes, – that has happened quickly. It’s not cardboard now, – feels like skin, – actually it feels like a womb. Can you be that? It’s floating (she turns her hands to face down and onto her knees) – elastic, – not tight. If it’s saying something, what kinds of things? There’s a feeling of reassurance, – something very strong, – not sure what it’s saying. Is there any sense of the “being” inside it? Yes. What sense? An awareness that

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 the being shouldn’t be there, – is trapped. What attitude is there to that being? Kind, – caring – understanding – like the little girl can look through the skin ...... and see outside. This skin knows she can break through and go outside. – It’s up to her. 184 Understanding

What does the womb sense of the outside? Fresh air, – landscape, – the big world. What feeling does the womb have for that outside? The womb wouldn’t mind dissolving away – so that it doesn’t have to exist any more, – so the little girl can then be out there in the world. Soon after this I brought my companion back into the room with me, back into the ordinary world. She looked sad/tearful. “That was very powerful,” she says. “It’s the deepest bit of work I’ve ever done.” “I’m quite shocked by it.” “It explains a lot.” It explains what? I ask. “It was so clear, making a connection to the age.” “The totality of the experience of my childhood, and seeing how that is with me now. – and it’s scary!” “I suppose I feel, if that is the way things are, should I be doing this kind of work?” Because? “I need to be able to live a bit, need some happiness, I need to be out there.” “I feel shaky, But glad I’ve done that.” Does it relate to where you started today? “Yes, it’s back to trying so hard, doing a hell of a lot of work for people.”

An emerging psychological perspective What I want to do here, with reference to the illustration just offered, is to outline something of the psychological perspective that has emerged over my professional lifetime. You will recognize that the conversation with my colleague was richly metaphori-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 cal, involving poetic imagination, being shaped by the personal search for meaning and understanding being undertaken. It was based in feeling, not in the sense of waves of emotion, but feeling as an activity of intimate exploration, involving touching and being touched by experiences. In this case, I was enabling my colleague to undertake questions with her life, bodily and holistically, rather than as puzzles to be solved by the intellect alone. Arising from a felt difficulty with her recent patient, my colleague conjured up a particular community of selves (involving a cardboard box, a fourteen year old girl, skin and a womb) through which she explored aspects of the issues involved. What emerged in the whole process was a changed understanding of the problem. This was not primarily a change in the explanation she might now be able to provide (though that did occur) but a profound, bodily and deeply felt experiencing of herself and aspects of her life in a different way. Enchanting psychology 185

What I want to do now is to look at the illustration a little more closely, in relation to two issues which are important in my perspective on psychological inquiry. I need to stress, before going on to these, that it is language, rather than numbers, which is central to this realm of psychological inquiry.

Language and conversation In much of psychology, language is an embarrassment. Many seem to think that we’d have a much better discipline if we could get rid of words and use statistics and mathematics instead. If language has to be used, there seems to be wide agreement that it should be made as puritanically undecorated as possible. After all, it’s “facts” that we want, not “fictions.” The perspective I’m reaching for is rooted, not just in language, but in conversation and conversational inquiry. Language is at the heart of conversational inquiry. It is not incidental or peripheral. This sense of language is not just in words and sentences, however important these are. It is to do with all the ways in which we body forth and convey meaning between and among ourselves. Language is in dress and design, in buildings and organizations, in music and gesture, in the silence between words and the stillness between movements. Anywhere there is language, poetry is her soul. There is a “dead” and routine way to speak and write, and there are ways of using living words, using even the most simple words in living ways. My friend and colleague, Angus Macmillan (1998),2 who is both a psychologist and a poet, wrote a poem called “Living Words,” and within that he lists these kinds of words –

the small words the big words the timid words the brave words the green words the serendipitous words the weasel words the singing words the swinging-from-the-light bulb words the couldn’t-do-without-them words the sock-it-to-them words the let’s dance words the unflinching words

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 the fin-breaking-the-surface words the can-I-kiss-you words the unerring words the erring words. All the words. All of them.

Searching to understand As I’ve said, the approach I work with can be seen as a different mode of psychological inquiry from the familiar objectifying approach of formal experimentation. It is concerned with different things. Its focus is on searching for understanding rather than researching to find and create facts. 186 Understanding

This mode of inquiry is concerned with changing and developing the qualities and capacities of the inquirer. In this way of working you must become capable of being in relationship, listening and conversing in ways which are appropriate to the other. Inquiry is not just a matter of “asking about” the other, but of listening to and “asking of” the other in ways that show the kind of respect and trustworthiness that may make meaningful communication possible. Searching is about following what you sense and feel, but do not yet know clearly what that is. It is about entering what is still unknown, almost touching but still out of reach. It is about giving form to feeling and in doing that being informed by what you find. It involves groping your way towards what is still beyond your reach and opening yourself to feel and know what can be experienced there. Feeling and imagination are central to this mode of inquiry. If you can identify something of what you feel at this moment, or in relation to a particular person or issue, by a word or phrase, you have pinpointed a “place” where closer inspection may be rewarding. If you ask the person to enter more fully into the feeling (identified by the word or phrase), you can encourage the person to allow an image to float to mind to give it a fuller expression. Images should not be, and perhaps cannot be, forced to appear. They have to be allowed. Imagination of this kind seems to be a natural phenomenon, readily available to many. The image that comes to mind can be considered, in its entirety, as a fuller articulation of what is being felt. This is the assumption that you work on as being probable. In the illustration, Judith starts by offering abstract words – “aliveness,” “busyness,” “quickness.” In each case, I want to get closer to what she feels. I want us to get as close in to her acts of feeling as possible. She gradually brings what she is feeling into sharper focus when she says she is in a very “tight” place. This allows her to focus still more as I ask her for her impression of this tight space. It is here that she takes a first major step to cross into the realm of the imagination, the land of make believe. “It’s like a box,” she offers, and with this more concrete image, an intimately imaginative journey gets more fully underway. The image of the box is something she can see and handle with greater fluency. Working with a noun is often easier and more fruitful. Adjectives and adverbs point the way. Nouns are doors. Note that this is not any abstract box. It has, in a “magic” way, got size and weight. It can be held in two hands and is made of cardboard. There is a lid at the top. With each detail Judith becomes more fully engaged, more intimately present to what she feels. And then she goes more deeply into the land of make believe. She finds that she is

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 not just looking at the box or holding it. She is in the box. The story becomes darker and more threatening. It is claustrophobic, lonely. I encourage her to stay with that discomfort. I sense that she may want to draw back and escape. I encourage her to let herself remain where she is. Just remain and feel how it is in this “lonely, dark place.” Quite intentionally I repeat her own words so that she can hear her own assessment of the place. I ask how it feels to be there. And here is another surprise in the imagined place. She feels she has been in this claustrophobic place for quite a long time – from before it was imagined into being by us. She is also able, as in a dream, to both feel herself to be inside the box, and at the same time see it from outside. Now I turn her attention to her sense of the being inside the box. I don’t assume this is just the adult person, my colleague, as she was when she entered my office. It is Enchanting psychology 187

necessary to leave the question open as to what kind of being she is referring to. This is the land of make believe, it is not the place of everyday awareness. It is a little person who is there, a girl who looks like her, with long hair and a pony tail. She recognizes that the girl is fourteen years old. She can see how she is dressed, the colours of her trousers and sweater, the kind of footwear. Each specific detail brings this being to life in my mind as well as hers. She is here in the room between us. Neither of us is listening as if from the outside. We are living in the place where all of this is happening. We are part of the geography of the story. Then another step on this search for personal understanding takes place. I start to speak not to the adult Judith, but to the “fourteen year old in the box,” and she has no difficulty in moving into that further position. She says that she feels a bit lost, bewildered, with sadness coming over her, having a sense that she has done something but not understanding what it is. Soon after this she, as the fourteen year old, is in the midst of family troubles, with a sense of displeasure from others and aggression all around outside the box. Of course it would be possible to stand back and “interpret” what might be going on. She seems to have created a defensive structure to protect herself from the pains of a dangerous family context. But this is not what I want to do at all. It is not intellectual explanations that I seek, but the possibility of a journey of discovery in feeling. It is experience that I seek for us, “in full cycle” as Kelly might have said. Here I will leave the issue of “searching,” in order to attend to the question of “understanding.” One of the old meanings of “understanding” in English is “to go to the place and stand under.” When you stand under something, in the ordinary world or in imagination, you are laying yourself open to another kind of experience. You will feel what otherwise you would not feel. If you don’t stand under, and go to the place where that is possible, you won’t feel anything of the intensity that may be found there. This is a different sense of “understanding” from the idea of giving an intellectual or technical account of something. This sense of the word results in you laying yourself open to feelings of a more intense kind. You make yourself available to be influenced by, taught by, moved by, infiltrated by the other (whatever or whoever that may be). You are no longer at a safe distance, seeing from afar, a spectator, well away from or above the fray. You are placing yourself in the midst of what you seek to understand. You are putting yourself in the way of what you may fear, so that who you are is available to being directly affected, touched, even changed. In the illustration, we have seen this kind of “going to the place and standing under” again and again. In the imaginative world, Judith went to the place of feeling claustro-

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 phobic and then to where she found herself inside the box. Then she went to the next place, now in the form of the “fourteen year old girl,” and allowed herself to “stand under” what it was like to be there. In undertaking these actions, she entered places which she would otherwise have avoided or never imagined. In going closer in and standing under what could only be felt there, she opened herself to hints and clues that would lead myself and her further into the questioning of her troubling awareness. She was engaged in asking her questions bodily as well as imaginatively. She was undertaking a quest, rather than trying to solve some of the puzzles in her head. Searching for understanding is a very different mode of inquiry from researching in structured ways to establish facts in an impersonal and objectifying manner. You are in the midst. You are involved. You are likely to be changed, in smaller or larger ways. 188 Understanding

Enchanting and disenchanting A transforming journey Before attending more abstractly to enchantment and disenchantment in the context of psychological inquiry, I will try to show something of what I mean in relation to the illustration in which Judith and I were involved. Broadly speaking, by enchanting, I refer to significant changes in awareness brought about through the wedding of feeling and imagination. I’m not jumping into a supernatural realm. I’m speaking of everyday experiences of transformation and ordinary “magic.” These are the kinds of experiences and events that are pretty familiar in psychotherapy and counseling, but I want to see them here as modes of more general psychological inquiry. Continuing where I left off in the illustration, the fourteen year old girl finds that she is caught up in the “anger and violence” of the family situation and feels unable to change it. “Being in the box is like hiding from it” she says. Then I ask Judith if she can speak for the girl. The girl says there needs to be a conversation between herself and “father.” She feels she is being expected to “engage in the suffering” of the family but wants to say how unfair it all feels. I now take her a step further into the make believe world we are sharing. I am aware that the box is a kind of protection between her and all that she feels is going on in the family of many years ago. I ask her to be the box. Now we really move further into the land of enchantment, of the kind of magic of fairy tales. She has no difficulty in doing this. As soon as she makes the imaginative move, she finds that the box is no longer made of cardboard, but of skin. Not only this, but it now feels like a womb. The cardboard has changed into skin and the box into a womb. (No surprises there then!) I ask her to be the womb now. The feeling there is very different from the claustrophobic box. It feels “floating, elastic.” It no longer feels tight and constraining. Something significant has changed. I ask her what kinds of things the womb may be communicating to the girl. She says there is “a feeling of reassurance, something very strong.” I ask if the womb has any sense of the being inside itself. She says that it does, and that there is “an awareness that the being shouldn’t be there.” I want to get a more rounded sense of what is going on between the womb and the being inside. She says it is “kind, caring, understanding” and there is a sense that the little girl in there can see through the womb to the outside world.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 It now seems that the “skin knows the girl can break through and go outside. It’s up to her.” Here I am being told, not what Judith knows, or what the girl knows, but what the womb knows. This is a realm where all sorts of things are possible that could not be so in the conventional way of seeing and feeling. To help the movement along, I ask what sense the womb has of the outside. The womb speaks of “fresh air, landscape, the big world,” with no longer any sense of threat or danger. We have reached a point where “the womb wouldn’t mind dissolving away, so the little girl can then be out there in the world.” As Judith comes back into her adult self, sitting in the familiar room with me, she looks sad and tearful. Has she had a rough time and is now upset that she was taken through all that? Not at all. She acknowledges that the experience was “very powerful” and says that it was “the deepest bit of work” she has ever done. Enchanting psychology 189

She is shocked by how much of her life it explains. So it wasn’t just a powerful experience. She was informed by it too. She has made a connection to the age of fourteen, when a lot of terrible things happened in her family. In the short time of our conversation she says she experienced “the totality” of her childhood and that was “scary.” Instead of feeling that she has always to be trying to please and pacify people, she has the sense that she needs “some happiness” out there in the world. She says she feels shaky, but glad that she’s undertaken this journey of searching for further understanding.

Enchanting psychological reality The word “enchant” comes from the French, chanter and the Latin, cantare, both meaning “to sing.” Chanting is used in many spiritual traditions, including the Christian and the Buddhist, as a means of entering more contemplative or meditative states of mind. More generally it means things like “to influence as if by a charm,” “to hold spell bound,” “to enrapture.” In a negative sense it can mean “to delude.” When I speak of “enchanting” Psychology, I’m not referring to anything supernatural but to the ordinary magic that can readily be found in everyday life. The kinds of transformations of awareness that can be involved are not, however, paid much notice in standard psychological theory or practice. For me, “enchantment” is another mode of psychological inquiry, very much involved in searching to understand. When I myself am involved in the processes of searching for understanding, scribbling my thoughts so that I can move on rather than be stuck in one place, and am yet again trapped at the front of my ordinary “nit picking” mind, I often find myself asking the question: “What is the deep song of my heart here?” If I’m again tired of my pedantic circuit of now familiar possibilities and want to reach closer in to what may be possible, I often seek the “deep song” rather than the superficial and the routine. What I think I’m doing here is to invoke enchantment. I’m trying to summon up a transformation in my consciousness, so that I listen more intimately and open myself to a different aspect of my awareness. What I’m trying to do is to remember and go to the place where a different quality of mind is to be found. This is the place where more imaginative fluency holds sway and where poetry arises. With Judith, I think this was the quality of awareness that she moved into as she engaged more fully in the imaginative journey that was opening. She was living in a transformed state of mind where she was being guided by the reality of her feelings, and expressing these feelings in words which conjured into being a different world.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 She was in a psychological place of potential fluidity where feelings change and transform in often amazing ways, where what is being experienced is being evoked and expressed in words. These words are ordinary words, often simple and easy to understand, but in this new and charged environment can become gateways to a new and powerful psychological reality. The kind of fluidity involved here reminds me of one of Kelly’s basic assumptions that “man is a form of motion,” and his recognition that all kinds of things become possible if we have the imagination, courage and persistence to follow them through. Enchantment is involved in all creative activity, in qualities of spiritual awareness, in falling in love, in suddenly knowing what your vocation is, what you are being “called” to undertake. Enchantment, as a raised and transformed state of consciousness, may be involved in recognizing and living in relation to an ideal or a set of values 190 Understanding

which can take you through dangers and difficulties that would otherwise have seemed impossible to face. But enchantment can be dangerous too. We can be led into very dark worlds. The great rallies held by the Nazis were places of enchantment. They raised the spirits and stirred the souls of very many ordinary people. They led to previously unimagined atrocities. While enchantment makes many things possible that would not otherwise be attempted, it requires a process of “disenchantment” to allow us to evaluate, from a different place, where and who we are now. In the scientific world, one of the functions of formal experimentation is to provide a necessary process of disenchantment, so that what seemed wonderful and intuitively true can be checked in a more dispassionate way. This function is also met in Kelly’s notion of the “experiential cycle,” which moves through opening and searching, to a selection of crucial issues, and a testing out of their viability. We need the wonder of enchantment and the inspirations it brings, but must also remember that what emerges for us there needs to be checked. We are often tempted into illusions and need to undertake a process of necessary disillusionment, if we are to engage creatively and constructively in the ordinary world.

Personal inquiry and public psychology I have tried to say something about my own journey of psychological inquiry. This is not because I think it specially wonderful or informative for others, though it has held wonders for me. I sought a different understanding because I didn’t feel at home in what I felt as the often hard edged, arid and even brutal discipline of Psychology that was claiming to give a “scientific” account of myself, as well as everyone else. Since I didn’t recognize either the content of my concerns or the manner of my being, in so much that was being taught, I felt compelled to try to make and find a way of my own. Almost all of my own journey was “in the dark.” I couldn’t see much beyond what I was engaged with at that moment, whether that was “metaphor” or the “community of selves,” “story” or the need for psychologists to be “poet practitioners” if they were to edge towards being worthy psychological scientists. It was only recently that I was wondering again what kind of “place” I had been seeking to reach over all these years. What qualities might this psychological “home” have? So I asked myself this direct question – “What is it you have wanted all these years? What is it you have been searching for in the kind of psychological life that you have been living? Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 On the basis of the kinds of ideas you have developed and been writing about, what kind of ‘home’ have you have been seeking?” And no sooner had that question been given a form than a range of answers came tumbling forth! I’ll only mention a few.

x In the kind of psychological life I lived, I wanted something more intimate than I had known. I wanted something that I could relate to, that I could know in a closer way. I did not want something cold, dead and without loyalty of any kind to me. x I wanted something more magical, more imaginatively engaging than I had found. I wanted to reach into what was there, to bring it alive for myself and others. I did not want to carry out inquests on dead dogs alone. Enchanting psychology 191

x I wanted some way of living that opened out avenues and vistas which were hidden and condensed by closeness and blindness. I wanted a place to move in, rather than a two dimensional projection that claimed to be a conclusion. x I wanted more fluidity and subtlety, more sense of flow and movement. I wanted to be right there, where the action was, living off the land, on the move. I did not want a psychological life which depended on factory made products and procedures brought from far away cities, with the shiny trademarks of major manufac- turers upon their sides. x I wanted to enter into conversation. I wanted to see and hear, listen to and say more of what was going on. I wanted to allow more of who we are to have a say, to become alive in the here and now, rather than being made to conform as traits and types of any kind. I wanted to hear the many voices within the voice, rather than have everyone boiled down to be “on message.” x I wanted to care for the language that we live and which expresses who and where and how we are. We are creatures who both hide in language, and therein reveal who we are. x I wanted the lovely succulence of words, the delight of surprise, the way in which juices from different plants are squeezed together on the tongue to make a flavour that no single plant can imitate. x I wanted playfulness and profundity. I wanted the angels and the devils, the boys and the girls of ideas, the frolic and intercourse of everything. I wanted everything to be able to bend back and forth on everything, singing – or in silence – uttering its awesome emptiness.

Overall, I wanted to understand and not just know the facts. I wanted to be able to melt into what was in and around, so that I could feel it and give it form. I wanted to “feel the import of,” not just the bare message but how it is angled and weighted, thinned and given a twist in the tail. Overall in Psychology, I have the sense that we need to be moving (even if slowly) towards a situation in which we allow and encourage many more voices, so that we get a far wider and richer sense of what people are engaged with psychologically, and a fuller sense of the diversity of the directions in which their concerns lead them. Just as in politics, perhaps, we should be moving from a situation where a single ruler, or a small number of “important” people, decide what issues matter, to a situation where the views and concerns of many more in the population are given a voice in our common affairs. Arising from my personal, psychological journey of inquiry, I’ve arrived, then, at two interrelated modes of inquiry which were no part of how I was trained. These are widely practiced but seldom named.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 I’m suggesting that searching for understanding should be a complement to researching for information so that much more of what goes on in inquiry is given respect and importance. In this way we could have a “two handed” psychology rather than depending on only one. Similarly, I’m suggesting that we need two psychological “eyes,” to see in greater “depth,” rather than just one. We need to be able to “see” into the realm of make believe, of “as if” or imaginative transformation, as well as seeing what is “conventionally” recognized. We need to be able to move between these ways of seeing rather than being stuck with one or the other. These two complementary modes of inquiry may open up more possibilities of understanding than either on their own. The present time is sometimes called the “age of information.” We have access to vast numbers of facts, and endless information on the world wide web, as well as 192 Understanding

through every agency in our managerial society. Effectiveness and efficiency are the ideals of the moment, in government and business as well as in health care and education. All of this is fine, up to a point, but we are reaching a stage where we are destroying what we sought to improve. As we head down the single track of “efficiency” we seem to find that there is no turning back. Every aspect of our lives is liable to be counted and codified, so that there is less and less room for personal initiative or even common sense. Treatments are being computerized or produced in manual form, so that no place is left for meaningful conversation or personal variation. It’s as if our goal is to achieve a mechanical world in which repairs can be done by the book, in an automatic way, without the need for human intervention. I am very much in favor of science and the scientific approach. However, what we mainly mean by “science” in psychology is a very narrow and hard headed affair. Yet in a subject like Psychology, which is about the beings who imagine and undertake every kind of science, art, adventure and imaginative possibility, we are in danger of excluding more of our legitimate subject matter than we can afford to lose. My love of Psychology and Science makes me ever more aware that we have to ask questions of what we, individually and socially, are up to. Kelly’s question as to what we may yet be able to make of psychology and science is one that urgently needs our imaginative attention. Our lives require the nourishment of poetry and art as well as the precision of science and mathematics. We need intimacy as well as what we call “objectivity,” imagination as well as practicality. We need the nourishment of living language, as well as the statistical information that may guide particular choices. It is a better balance that I seek, a better mix, not an either/or choice which will damage us even more.

Note 1 Keynote address presented at the 14th Biennial Congress of the Constructivist Psychology Network, Niagara Falls, NY, USA, 22–24 July, 2010. A version of this chapter was originally published as Mair, M. (2012) “Enchanting psychology: The poetry of personal inquiry,” Journal of Constructivist Psychology 25: 184–209. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals). 2 Reprinted by permission of Angus Macmillan. Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 REFERENCES

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Adam and Eve 4, 27, 150, 163 Chiari, G. xv aggression 114, 171–2, 187 choice 3, 5, 7, 9, 27, 87, 89–90, 115, 119, Allport, G. 179 150, 160, 171, 192 anticipation 54, 66, 86, 88, 99, 116, 152–5, Christ 4, 15, 151, 156, 163 160 Christianity 3–4, 105, 151, 156, 160–1, anxiety 4, 88, 99, 108, 114, 143, 166–7, 164, 189 171–2 Church of Scotland x, 164 Aristotle 75–6, 81, 138 City University xi arts 3, 85, 93, 100, 111, 132, 161, 176, 192 Cohan, S. 36 Augustine, Saint 100 Coleridge, S.T. 76, 78 awareness 55, 57, 85, 88, 138, 156–9, 163, commitment 3, 155 166, 169, 171, 176, 178, 187–9 community of selves 24, 95, 102, 105–18, 139, 162, 164, 166–7, 171–2, 179, 184, Bacon, F. 47 190 Bakan, D. 61, 67 constructs 54–7, 76, 84–6, 88, 92, 113–16, Bakhtin, M. 31–3, 133 118, 152, 158 Bannister, D. x, xiv, 28, 55, 70, 119, 123 conversation xi, 28, 31, 34–41, 44–50, 58, Barbour, I.G. 74, 78 125, 131–4, 137–40, 146, 151, 156, 164, Barfield, O. 79 169, 172–4, 180, 184–5, 191–2 Barthes, R. 124 conversational inquiry xi, 40, 49–50, 60, 64, Beavin, J.H. 98, 132 66–9, 162, 185 behaviour therapy xi, 165, 178 Cooke, M. xv behavioural psychology x, xi, 7, 96, 103–4, Crichton Royal Hospital xi 113–14, 126, 132, 153 Crisp, A.H. xiv Belsey, C. 31–2 Crites, S. 136 Berger, P. 112 Culler, J. 46

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Berne, E. 111 culture 11, 19, 35, 40–1, 44–5, 47, 70, 79–80, Bible 3, 8, 151 90, 123, 125, 129, 132, 135–6, 138, 146, Binet, A. 111 158, 177–8 Boyd, P.R. xiv Cummins, P. 18 British Psychological Society xi, 39, 50 Cupitt, D. 151 Bromley, D.B. 65 Brooks-Rose, C. 79 Darwin, C. 102 Brown, J.A.C. 111 deconstruction 37 Buddha 156, 159 depression 48, 74 Buddhism 151–2, 156–9, 161, 164, 189 Derrida, J. 12 Burke, K. 79, 83 Descartes, R. 43, 47, 80, 139 dialogue 31–3, 37, 58, 133–4 Centre for Personal Construct Psychology xii discourse xi, 19, 31–9, 46, 50, 81, 124, 127 Cervantes, M. de 128 Dixon, P. 37 Changes xi Donne, J. 105 198 Index

Dunne, J. xv Institute of Psychiatry x Džinovic´, V. xv, 176 invitational mood 84, 90–1, 97 involvement 3, 6, 14, 17, 18, 155 Eliot, T.S. 19, 74 Ellenberger, H.P. 111 Jackson, D.D. 79, 98, 132 Empson, W. 83 James, W. 69 epistemology 4, 7, 16, 151 Janet, P. 111 Epting, F. xv, 9 Johnson, S. 76 ethogenics 7 Jourard, S.M. 58 evil 4–6, 18, 26, 149–51, 160, 163 Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling experiments 3, 14, 23, 51–4, 57–9, 64–6, 68, and Psychotherapy xi 96–7, 127, 139–40, 174, 185, 190 Jung, C. 111, 127

Fairbairn, W.R.D. 111 Kafka, F. 129 faith 3, 7, 154–6 Karas, E. xv fear 4, 26, 34–5, 88–9, 114, 124, 144, 149, Kelly, G.A. x, xii, 3–6, 8–11, 15–19, 21, 153–4, 175–6, 187 26–8, 42, 54–6, 60, 62–3, 66, 70, 73–4, Fingarette, H. 63–4, 92, 112 84–93, 95–100, 105, 113–18, 132, 149–65, Fiske, J. 37 168–71, 175–9, 187, 189–90, 192 fixed role therapy 55–7, 118, 155–6 Kelly Club x Flaubert. G. 130 Kelman, H.C. 53, 58 Foss, M. 100 King-Spooner, S. xii Frances, M. xv, 176 Kinharvie Institute xi Fransella, F. x, xv Klein, M. 111 Freud, S. 102–3, 111, 130, 138 Knight, R. 165 Friedman, N. 51 knowledge 12, 16–18, 20–3, 25, 26, 44–5, 47, Fromm, E. 111 49, 56, 74, 102, 128, 132, 154–5, 174–5, Frost, R. 9 179 Kundera, M. 128–30 Garden of Eden 3, 150, 163 Geering, L. 151 Laing, R.D. 65, 111 Genesis 15 Landfield, A.W. xiv–xvi, 9, 101 Glasgow Caledonian University xi Langer, S. 97 good 4–6, 18, 26–7, 149–51, 160, 163 language 11–12, 16, 19, 28, 31–2, 36–8, Greece 4, 15, 74 41, 43, 45–7, 49–50, 55, 75–6, 78–82, guilt 3–4, 7, 26–7, 84, 88–9, 114, 118, 149, 84, 90–1, 99, 107, 124, 126, 132–3, 153, 168 137–8, 146, 151, 162–3, 175, 178, 185, Guntrip, H.J.S. 111 191–2 Lawson, H. 12 Haley, J. 79–80, 82 learning theory x Hanh, T.N. 157–9 linguistics 36, 126 Hart, D.A. 151 literary theory 32, 34, 37–8, 126, 128, 132 Hartley, J. 37 love 46, 94, 189

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 Hawkes, T. 78–9, 82 Luther, M. 4 Heidegger, M. 12, 49, 128 Hillman, J. 127 Macdonell, D. 31 Hinkle, D. 56, 62 Macmillan, A. 136, 146, 185, 192 Holub, R.C. 37 Macmurray, J. 70, 112 hostility 114 Macy, J. 152 Howards, G.S. 127, 136 Maher, B. x, 15, 73, 163, 178 humanistic psychology 4, 104, 111, 125 Mair, I. xii–xiii Husserl, M. 128 Mair, J.M.M. x, xii, xiv–xv, 10, 18–19, 24, 28, 35, 37, 39, 55, 58, 62, 66, 70, 105, imagery xi, 47, 78, 139–41, 163, 174, 119, 127, 134–6, 161–2, 170, 176, 179, 179–80, 186–8, 191 192 inquiry 18, 19, 25–8, 35, 40, 46, 49–50, Marias, J. 77, 79 58–60, 86–7, 96, 98–100, 103, 155, 161–3, marketed care xi, 38, 125–6 168, 171, 174–6, 185–6, 188, 191 Marx, K. 130 Index 199

Maudsley Hospital 179 politics 107–8, 111, 115, 123, 127, 132, 139, McCaig, N. 74 167, 191 McDougall, W. 111 Polkinghorne, D.P. 136 Mead, G.H. 112 Poole, R. 48 mechanism 80, 90, 103, 192 power 18, 23, 38–9, 45, 124–5, 129, 176 meditation 49, 156, 158, 189 prayer 49, 156 metaphor xi, 14, 27–8, 36, 42–3, 46, 48, Procter, H. xii 74–97, 99–100, 104–7, 110–18, 133, 135, Protestant tradition 3–4, 151 138–40, 142, 145–6, 150–1, 162, 173, psychoanalysis 63, 104, 112, 127, 132, 179–80, 184, 190 135–6, 163–4, 166 Meyer, V. xiv Psychology and Psychotherapy Midgley, M. 163 Association xi Milgram, S. 51, 59 psychotherapy xi, 5, 25, 27, 31–2, 34–6, mindfulness 159–60, 164 38–43, 45, 47, 50, 55, 57, 78–80, 92, 104, Mischel, W. 64 123, 125–9, 131–46, 149–51, 162, 165–6, moral science of action x, 6, 18, 19, 150 172, 174–5, 179–80, 188, 192 morality 4–5, 18 Mozart, W.A. 4, 8, 15 Raine, K. 74 Murray, H.A. 63 Reed, N. xii reflexivity 12, 16, 22, 100 Nanananda, Bhikku 152 Reider, N. 78 narrative xi, 10, 12–17, 31, 36–8, 45, 47, 50, religion 3–4, 15, 18, 27–8, 74, 85, 93, 112, 124, 127, 133–4, 136, 140, 146 116, 132, 136, 150, 152, 155–6, 160–1, National Health Service xi, 34, 126 163–5 Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in repentance 3–4 the Humanities and Social Sciences 101 repertory grid technique x, 8, 11, 55–7, 73, New Forum xi 113, 115, 118, 164 Newton, I. 80 research 25, 40, 42, 49, 51–2, 57, 62–3, 127, Nietzsche, F. 12, 88 146, 162, 165, 168, 171, 178, 185, 187, Norris, C. 37 191 novels 123, 127–30, 146 rhetoric xi, 37–8, 45, 47, 75–6, 124, 137, Nuzzo, M.L. xv 140, 146, 151, 153–4, 158, 160–1, 163 Richards, I.A. 75–6, 79, 81–3, 85, 160 Ogden, C.K. 83 Riesman, D. 111 ontology 7, 90 Rilke, R. 19 Orne, M.T. 51, 59 risk 3, 6–7, 15, 34 O’Sullivan xii–xiii role 54–6, 58, 60, 62, 66, 118, 151, Ott, H. 89 162, 172 Romanyshyn, R.D. 127 Parker, S. 75 Rosenthal, K. 51, 58 Pavlovic´, J. xv, 176 Rousseau, J.J. 75 Perls, F.S. 111 Rowan, J. 112, 138 personal construct psychology see personal Rowe, N. 83

Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016 construct theory Rychlak, J.F. 51, 65 personal construct theory x–xii, 6, 21–2, 26–7, 54, 57, 68–9, 73–4, 83–9, 95–7, 100, Salmon, P. x, xiv 105, 112–13, 115, 118, 127, 132, 149–52, Sarbin, T. 136 159–64, 178 Sartre, J.P. 92 personal inquiry 25, 27, 112, 170, 177–9, 190 Saussure, F. de 36, 46 personal knowing 3, 7, 21, 23, 25–8, 93, 132, Schon, D. 77–8, 81–2 155, 176 Schultz, D.P. 51, 57, 68 personification 82, 93–5, 108, 111 science 3–8, 10, 13, 18, 21–2, 27–8, 32, 36–7, Plato 111 42, 44, 47–8, 51–5, 57, 60, 62, 65–7, 69, poetics xi, 37, 75 73–5, 84–6, 90–1, 93, 97–100, 102–4, 111, poetry xi, 36, 47, 74–6, 81–2, 84–5, 127, 113, 115–16, 126–7, 135, 149–51, 153–6, 129–30, 132, 135, 139, 151, 157, 162, 161, 165, 169–70, 174–5, 190, 192 176–7, 179, 184–5, 189–90, 192 Seeman, J. 53 Polanyi, M. 23, 93, 113, 132, 169 Selden, R. 37 200 Index

self 12–14, 16, 24, 33–4, 38, 74, 90, 94–5, text 32, 34 103, 105–6, 108, 111–12, 114–19, 129, Tholstrup, M. xv 134, 138–41, 143, 145, 157–9, 162, 166, Thomas, O. 77–9, 82 169, 171, 173, 175, 179 threat 4, 23, 48, 50, 84, 88, 93, 118, 125, 142, 188 self characterization Tillich, P. 88 55–7, 60 time 153, 159 self-deception 63, 92, 104, 112 Todorov, T. 32, 134 Shafer, R. 127 transference 77, 81, 104, 111 Shelley, P.B. 76 Turbayne, C.M. 78, 80–2, 91 Shillito-Quirke, C. xv Shires, L.M. 36 understanding xi, 15–16, 27, 40, 81, 89, Simons, H.W. 37 92–6, 99, 105, 124–5, 131–2, 142, 145, sin 3–4, 89, 149–51 149–50, 152, 154–8, 160–3, 165, 168–71, Skinner, B.F. 103 174, 176–7, 184–5, 187, 191 smoking 93, 106 University of Aberdeen x social contract 75 University of Hertfordshire xii Spence, D.P. 127, 136 University of London x, 164 Sperber, D. 83 spirituality xi, 19, 164, 175–6, 189 Vaihinger, H. 15, 91 stammering 94, 107–10 Veblen, T. 79 Steiner, G. 49 Verene, D.P. 47, 139 Stevens, W. 79, 83–4 Vico, G. 47, 139 Stojnov, D. xv, 176 Storr, A. 111 Warren, N. xv story telling xi, 10–17, 31, 34–8, 43, 47, Watzlawick, P. 98, 132 50, 123–46, 150–1, 160, 163, Wheelwright, P. 79, 83 176, 179, 190 Whitehead, A.N. 74 Stricker, L.J. 53 Whitman, W. 15 Stringer, P. xiv, 28 Wiggins, J.P. 136 suicide 89 Winter, D. xii Sullivan, H.S. 111 Wordsworth, W. 76 symptoms 80 Wright, K.J.T. 62, 80 Downloaded by [New York University] at 12:11 14 August 2016