How Our Psyche Works from a Constructivist Perspective

I talk about constructivism a lot. Chances are, whatever the topic is, I’ll find a way to work it in the conversation. It’s my secret plan to make it as popular as possible, because I think people’s lives would be much simpler if they adopted more of that worldview.

There are many flavors of constructivism out there and I don’t like them all equally. These different kinds of constructivism share some common epistemological claims. Put in less pretentious words, claims about how human knowledge works, what and how we know. One common idea is that knowledge is constructed, and not discovered, that we construct our world instead of seeing it objectively. Different types of constructivism disagree on the specifics, they take this assumption to explore different topics or draw different conclusions; whereas some are relatively down-to-Earth, others make deep metaphysical claims about the nature of reality, or the lack of any intrinsic nature, as the case may be. Even those these ideas are thought provoking and deep, they won’t be the topic of this article. At least in this one, I will stay closer to Earth and write about a specific type of constructivist personality theory.

George Kelly (1905 - 1967)

The form of constructivism I will be writing about is called personal construct psychology. It’s not the only constructivist psychology we have, but it is the kind that I prefer, and this is my article on my blog so I get to choose. (Another constructivist psychologist is the well-known developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget.). Personal construct psychology (PCP) is a theory of personality and a form of psychotherapy invented by the great American psychologist George Kelly. 

I say “great” even though he is not a household name like Freud is or William James. The reason why he isn’t a household name is that his theory isn’t as simple and easy to digest in a few words and he wasn’t much of a public figure in his lifetime. He was a professor and, unfortunately, wasn’t particularly interested in spreading his ideas outside of the academic world. Even psychologists sometimes have a hard time understanding his ideas and their full weight, mischaracterizing him as a cognitive or proto-cognitive psychologist. Reading Kelly isn’t a particular ordeal, but understanding Kelly can be. 

Another reason why you haven’t heard of Kelly before is that he didn’t play by the rules. He wasn’t interested in adhering to a particular school of thought, and he wasn’t interested in usual ways of seeing human psychology. Although he saw some merit in the depth and beauty of Freud’s ideas, he didn’t find them particularly applicable to rural Kansas during the Great Depression since Freud’s vocabulary was very much fin de siècle, upper middle-class Vienna, and not so much impoverished dust bowl farmers that Kelly was helping. Even though he could appreciate the practical nature of behaviorism, he rightly thought that it’s terribly reductive. Kelly rejected both approaches to the point that he almost entirely abandoned the language that they use. In the preface of his 1955 opus magnum, he writes:

It is only fair to warn the reader about what may be in store for him. In the first place, he is likely to find missing most of the familiar landmarks of psychology books. For example, the term learning, so honorably embedded in most psychological texts, scarcely appears at all. That is wholly intentional; we are for throwing it overboard altogether. There is no ego, no emotion, no reinforcement, no drive, no unconscious, no need.  (Kelly, 1955, p. x)

Right at the beginning, he throws out the vocabulary of modern psychology of his day, and ours too! Then he clarifies his target audience:

To whom are we speaking? In general, we think the reader who takes us seriously will be an adventuresome soul who is not one-bit afraid of thinking unorthodox thoughts about people, who dares peer out at the world through the eyes of strangers, who has not invested beyond his means in either ideas or vocabulary, and who is looking for an ad interim, rather than an ultimate, set of psychological insights. (Kelly, 1955, p. xi) 

Right there, Kelly alienated most of his readers. Scientists are intelligent and capable people, but they’re not always open to throwing away the entire vocabulary of their field, even when it’s replaced by a sophisticated and well-structured theory like Kelly’s. They are usually too busy trying to get tenure, and no one wants to make things more difficult on the way there. As Richard Rorty once famously put it – play by the rules until you get tenure, and then write what you really think.

Kelly’s unorthodox approach is what makes him unique and truly great, but at the same time it’s what hinders his theory from being more popular. Hopefully, if you have the patience to finish this article, I’ll be able to “translate” and make it accessible – at least its bare bones, and you’ll get a glimpse of the greatness and the transformational power of constructivist thinking.

The Fundamental Metaphor

Kelly’s view of human beings is as forms of motion. We live in a dynamic universe that always changes and so we too must change along with it. Therefore, humans are not static. In Kelly’s constructivism, humans are seen as processes that continuously unfold. To understand humans is to understand how these process-being change in the ever-lasting process of becoming. 

The fundamental metaphor of personal construct psychology is “person as scientist”. Scientists come up with hypotheses about their area of research and test them experimentally. Once they get results, they either keep using the hypotheses, if they’re backed up by evidence, or they reject them. In constructivism, we see human beings as scientists, only the science they’re studying is their life and circumstances they find themselves in. 

As we go about our lives, we continuously test our assumptions about the world. Assumptions are either adopted from our culture or our immediate environment, or they’re products of our previous experiences, lessons we learned in the past. This is where the epistemology of constructivism meets human psychology – and in a minute I’ll explain how. For now, put a pin in this, and follow me some more, I promise I’ll get to my point! 

Everything we do or say is an experiment, because behind every action or utterance there is a hypothesis, an anticipation of a certain outcome. In every moment we are being scientists. Under normal circumstances, we keep those hypotheses backed up by the evidence from our immediate experience, and we reject those that are invalidated. (I can’t help but add more complexity – feeling invalidated isn’t the same as our having our hypothesis invalidated, because feeling good isn’t always what we’re anticipating, nor is every anticipation as conscious. We can’t put everything into words and a good part of our scientific activity takes place on different symbolic levels, not through language.)

What happens to those hypotheses that are validated? We keep recycling them for as long as they’re useful in those specific contexts in which they perform a function successfully. Just like hypotheses from physics aren’t useful in psychology, our personal science has its own context. Hypotheses about communication at work, for example, might not be useful in your relationship or with your kids, and vice versa. It’s through testing in real life that we get to learn about their advantages as well as their limitations. 

This also has a “dark” side. Because the world is always in motion, our hypotheses are in motion too. That means that your social roles and your identity can’t stand still. The work of change is never done. What is useful today, won’t be useful tomorrow.

Constructs

Where are the constructs, you might be asking? It is an article about constructivism, and we all know pretentious intellectuals like to use the word construct because it makes them feel smart, so where are the constructs, Vladimir? The hypotheses that we’re testing are the constructs, dear reader! They are not just tools that explain the world, they are our world.

In this form of constructivism, we see constructs as binaries, as oppositions. For every happy there has to be sad, at least for happy to make sense, it has to be the opposite of sad. Kelly’s definition of a construct is rather technical and not very sexy, so I won’t use it here. Suffice it say that constructs are binaries that we use to organize our experience, and our experience is made up of our little experiments. Our experiments are, in turn, how we interact with the world. 

These binaries are sometimes “public”, shared, like the gender binary, or our ideas about how economy works, religious beliefs, etc. Others are deeply private and only make sense in the context of your specific private experiences and desires. 

We don’t have infinitely many constructs, as that would be completely impractical, and they’re not all equally important, or we would be in a constant state of confusion, trying to figure out how to act whenever we encounter a dilemma. Constructs are organized and there is a hierarchy. The higher you go, the fewer you find. Those at the very top are only a handful and they make up our sense of self. 

Constructive alternativism

This phrase, constructive alternativism, the phrase that just rolls off your tongue, is how Kelly calls the philosophy underlying his psychology. Here is how he defines it, clearly and concisely:

We assume that all of our present interpretations of the universe are subject to revision or replacement.

This an incredibly freeing philosophy because it allows us to escape dilemmas that cause us pain by completely redefining the way we see them. When you apply a different construct to an event, it becomes a different event. It’s not just that your view on it changes, the event itself becomes something else for you. You see, constructs are not only useful tools that help us live, but they also shape our reality – what we see, how we see it, but also what we can’t see and what we can’t even think about.

In a sense, what constructivism tells us is that we have the freedom to construe things in different ways, but once we settle in a construction, if we forget that it’s just a construct, we can oppress ourselves with it. 

Meaning

Sometimes my clients ask me why I’m so obsessed with meaning. This is because meaning is central to constructivist thinking. Meaning is what determines our actions. We act in a certain way because things mean something to us. In constructivism, we look for meaning in a person’s constructs. Meaning is not to be found in any specific construct, but in their mutual connections. An individual construct is just a guide for action – your theory that was once a hypothesis; but it’s what it implies in your system of constructs that gives it meaning. 

Our brains have not evolved to know the truth

Here’s the catch with constructivism. It’s a sublime form of skepticism, in the best tradition from Sextus Empiricus all the way to Richard Rorty. It takes everything with a grain of salt. Many people find this annoying, but I find it freeing. 

Some evolutionary psychologists think – rightly so, according to us constructivists – that our brains didn’t really evolve to be objective or to know the truth, but to help us survive. Think about the words I was using earlier on: hypothesis, theory, construct. No mention of objectivity or truth. 

Our ability to conceptualize the world hasn’t been honed to discover what’s true over the millennia of our evolution, but to figure out what’s useful. Cognition is a tool. A powerful one, but still a tool. If you think about it, we actually have no way of immediately experiencing reality. What we see is merely a translation of light exciting certain cells and then our brains make an image out of it. It’s an imagining of reality more than anything else. We can’t step outside of our brain to verify that this image corresponds to reality. Our sense of touch is also electrical activity of certain cells, not an inherent quality of anything external. 

When you think about someone, you can only think about them based on the information you have and the information you have is filtered through your constructs. You can’t quite jump out of your own experience into reality and see it in its true form -  we can’t quite know if reality is anything objectively, if it has a true form. Especially not because we see the world as a process that continuously develops and unfolds. You can reconstruct the world by hypothesizing based on what you already know (previously validated hypotheses). In fact, constructivism tells us that we can’t quite say anything about what reality is like, only how it appears to us from different points of view. 

Another famous constructivist, Humberto Maturana put it succinctly: everything is said by an observer. You can’t not be an observer. As an observer you have a point of view, and if you have a point of view, you don’t have the point of view. 

This is where many people run into problems with constructivism and start yelling nonsense like “this is relativism!” or more recently “this is postmodern neo-Marxist garbage” or “leftist thinking gone awry!”. People become very anxious when you tell them that what they hold true and dear to their hearts is nothing more than a hypothesis. 

Let me reassure you. Or try to, anyway. Things are much simpler and quite easy to grasp. 

Imagine our ancestors. They lived in a world that was much more dangerous than the world we live in, although we still have a long way to go to create a truly peaceful world. In fact, we may destroy the world before we have a chance to improve it further, but let’s put my pessimistic predictions aside. Our distant ancestors had to be very vigilant. You could easily be killed by someone from the neighboring tribe or attacked by a dangerous animal or contract a deadly disease. There were poisonous plants around, snakes, lions, tigers and what not. Let’s say you’re walking in the woods, and you hear a strange noise. You are far more likely to survive if you assume there’s some sort of mortal danger there and run back to your village, than if you assume that there’s a lovely little kitty you could adopt as a pet. The truth of the situation isn’t important, survival is. So you run. And you have a chance to transfer that knowledge to your offsprings, unlike the poor guy who thought the tiger was a tender puppy.

What can we say about what the world is really like then?

We can say that it exists. We can say that it’s, like us, a process. Something that “goes about its business of existing” (Kelly, 1955), but that’s pretty much it. As constructivists, we are happy with that, and we are happy to come up with different ways to mold that world. We are far more likely to ask the following questions:

-        What is the world like from a specific perspective?

-        What are the underlying assumptions for a certain worldview to be possible?

-        What are the constructs that give rise to a specific view of the world?

-        If we see the world in a certain way, what possibilities does that open for us?

What is the world really like? We don’t like to waste time with questions we can’t answer. 

What is a psychological problem, according to constructivism?

If you remember from one of the previous sections of this article, Kelly’s fundamental idea is that every person is like a scientist, going around forming and testing hypotheses about the world. This is where we can start looking for an idea of how we see psychological disorders in constructivism. 

It’s obvious. If a normal human is a good scientist, then struggling with some mental health issues means that some of the science done by the person isn’t very good. That person is a bad scientist. 

What does that mean? 

It means that in constructivism we don’t have to label people with specific disorders in order to help them. As we work in therapy, we map a person’s system of construct and find those that the person won’t change even though there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence suggesting the need for it. Having a psychological problem means being unwilling to give up on a construct because for one reason or another, it’s an important part of who you are. 

In the beginning, I mentioned that Kelly saw humans as forms of motion. A disorder is refusal to honor this fundamental fact of our experience. Not wanting to give up on a construct that doesn’t work is the opposite of being a form of motion, it’s an attempt to stop the motion. 

The advantage of this approach is that we don’t see people through their diagnoses, but as humans who do their best to make sense of the world they live in, based on what they were able to get out of previous experiences. Constructivism offers a set of tools that help us step into our clients’ shoes and understand the world as they see it. That means that change comes more organically, from authentic needs of the person we work with, and not from a generic diagnostic manual. 

 What is it like to live as a constructivist?

Being such a highly technical theory, constructivism rarely offers texts that talk about its implications for our everyday lives, and there are many. This deserves a lot more attention than I can give it here, and in the future, I will address this in another article. 

Because our self-image is just that – an image we have in our minds, we don’t have to take it all that seriously. This theory dissolves our “shoulds” and “musts”. We start asking different questions and judge ourselves a little less. Instead of thinking “I’m a complete failure”, a constructivist asks: “What does it mean to fail?” or “Why is it important for me to be successful?”, or: “What are the implications of this event?”

Constructivism helps us develop a different relationship to our thoughts and feelings. Instead of being glued to our experience of the world, we get to evaluate it based on how useful it is to us. The old Buddhist adage “don’t believe everything you think” works well in constructivism too, but we can take it one step further: don’t believe anything you think unless you see it works for you!

As a result, a constructivist acts without full certainty but with curiosity and openness. We act based on our hypotheses, but we understand them as such and are willing to change our minds when circumstances call for it. Change is made easier when we don’t think of our psyche as set in stone or our identity as something real. 

I will end with Kelly’s words. They contain the kind of courage and hopeful optimism that constructivism gives us:

A good deal is said these days about being oneself. It is supposed to be healthy to be oneself. While it is a little hard for me to understand how one could be anything else, I suppose what is meant is that one should not strive to become anything other than what he is. This strikes me as a very dull way of living; in fact, I would be inclined to argue that all of us would be better off if we set out to be something other than what we are. Well, I'm not so sure we would all be better off - perhaps it would be more accurate to say life would be a lot more interesting.