Re: [xmca] Personal (?) Constructs

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Hi David
I have not read this book, but have always intended to.
In my graduate training at UBC was a scholar who had studied with George
Kelly . His name was Larry Cochrane. He had a profound impact on these
students.

Your students may want to explore a link between "personal construct
theory" and "dialogical self theory".
I noticed that in this past year there was a conference where these 2
perspectives were being brought together to look at their "family
resemblances."

Larry
On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 3:57 AM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> I have a couple of graduate students who are doing a particular line of
> research I somewhat dislike (questionnaire and follow up interview, as
> opposed to "real work" analyzing transacripts), but I feel obliged to
> assist in any way I can (one of them is working with North Korean refugee's
> kids). So I read George Kelly's "Theory of Personality".
>
> For those of you who don't know it, it's part of a huge volume of work
> from the 1950s on an approach to psychotherapy called "Constructive
> Alternativism", or "Personal Construct Psychology". It is, I suppose,
> loosely phenomonological and broadly introspective, although Kelly's is a
> kind of outward bound introspectiveness, since he sees concepts as
> basically about predicting real events in life.
>
> I'm interested it for a couple of reasons.
>
> a) Personal constructs are dichotomous, meaning not mutually exclusive but
> mutually defining (rather like "sense" and "meaning", or
> "teaching/learning" and "development", r any other good Vygotskyan
> distinction).
>
> b) They include concepts, but they also include preconceptual word
> meanings, i.e. "structures of feeling", such as "good/bad",
> "respect/contempt", "sympathy/antipathy". Kelly also thinks that "the
> concept is real, but its reality exists in its actual employment by its
> user, and not in the things which it supposed to explain", which sounds
> pretty damned Vygotskyan to me.
>
> c) Apparently, according to p. 152, this guy was using "Vigotsky's" block
> test back in 1955! Now, how the devil did he get ahold of them? He must
> have known Hanfmann and Kasenin....
>
> d) I think I may finally have found a book that Larry Purss has not read.
>
> Before I wax uncharacteristically uncritical though, let me note that he
> is ostentatiously ahistorical and asocial, and it really hurts him. For
> example, his idea of "role" is completely undevelopmental: roles come from
> nowhere and go nowhere.
>
> Towards the end of the book, when he tries to "rise to the concrete", this
> approach completely undoes him. He introduces two case studies: one is a
> black guy who grows up somewhere in the midwest going to high school with
> whites. For some mysterious reason he fantasizes about white chicks, and he
> can't persuade HIS family to approve (HIS feelings about HIS family, are
> apparently the source of the problem!)  The second one is about Jews
> adjusting or failing to adjust to their own cultural background.
>
> Yes, I denk I zee der paddern hier.... Zo...how long haf you had zis
> drubble, Doktor????
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
>
>
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