Personal Paths of Mutual Recognition: Relational Patterns and Narrative Identities from a Personal Construct Perspective

Abstract

This paper explores the intersubjective process of mutual recognition, drawing on a narrative-hermeneutic elaboration of Kelly’s personal construct theory. Kelly’s notions of dependency and role, Honneth’s and Ricoeur’s philosophical reflections on mutual recognition and intersubjective relationships, and Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative identity are considered, with a reference also to Benjamin’s relational psychoanalytic insight on the role of intersubjectivity in therapeutic relationships. Building on these contributions, the author proposes a differentiation between developmental trajectories—called “uncompleted paths of mutual recognition”—that supposedly derive from specific conditions of intersubjective imbalance. Such an imbalance is considered to be implicated in the majority of clinically significant cases of personal distress, in which the person suffers from a perceived lack of recognition from others. In doing so, the relational patterns relevant to such trajectories and the principal construct dimensions—often preverbalized constructions—that make up the narrative identities are tentatively outlined.

Keywords:

• Personal construct theory
• narrative-hermeneutic psychotherapy
• relational psychoanalysis
• intersubjectivity
• mutual recognition
• narrative identity
• dependency

Notes

1 Following a widespread tradition, I use the term “mother” in quotation marks to designate the role of the primary caregiver that can be fulfilled by persons other than the biological mother.

2 “In human society, at all its levels, persons confirm one another in a practical way, to some extent or other, in their personal qualities and capacities, and a society may be termed human in the measure to which its members confirm one another. […] The basis of man’s life with man is twofold, and it is one—the wish of every man to be confirmed as what he is, even as what he can become, by men; and the innate capacity in man to confirm his fellow-men in this way.” (Buber, 1957, pp. 101–102)

3 “No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead’, and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief; for these would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all.” (James, 1890, pp. 293–294)

4 Whereas Benjamin sees different attitudes of the “mother” at the basis of such distinction, Buber (1937) maintains that the I-Thou attitude precedes the I-It attitude in the development of children: “In the beginning is relation” (p. 18). However, development is characterized by the consistent enlargement of the It-world at the expense of the Thou-world, with a corresponding lessening of the Thou-attitude (cf. Chiari & Nuzzo, 2006).

5 Fundamental postulate: A person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events. (Kelly, 1955, p. 46)

6 “Guilt” is defined by Kelly (1955) as “the awareness of dislodgment of the self from one’s core structure” (p. 533).

7 I am aware that the most authoritative sources in infant research—from Bowlby (1969) and Sander (1975) to the present—argue that the very beginnings of a reciprocal coordination between caregivers and infants emerge at about 3–6 months and are completed in the first year of life. Before this period, caregivers are assumed to be solely responsible. The view of an extreme helplessness of the infant in the early months appears to be founded on two main dissimilarities: (1) between the adult’s relative autonomy and the infant’s heavy reliance for survival on the support of others, and (2) between the adult’s purposeful, goal-directed behavior and the infant’s unintentional, “primative” behavior, that needs to be imbued with meaning by the caregivers (Sroufe, 2000, p. 68). I find this view questionable in the light of a narrative hermeneutic elaboration of PCT, where intersubjectivity is regarded as essential. Ultimately, the fundamental asymmetry in the relationship between caregivers and infants consists in being the former self-conscious but not the latter, and in the implications that arise from it, one of the most important being the possibility to treat oneself and other people as “interpreting subjects” as well as “objects of interpretation.” I mean that either the presumed other people’s interpretations of their experience or other people as a whole can be the elements of one’s constructions, and the infant is one of such people. In turn, infants experience the world through movements and senses, being initially unable to differentiate between self and the surrounding environment. Nonetheless, they appear deeply involved in experimenting. I agree with Benjamin (2004) when she writes that recognition “begins with the early nonverbal experience of sharing a pattern, a dance” (p. 16) in “proto-conversations” with the caregiver (Bateson, 1971), a view reminiscent of the discourse between a mother and a newborn child in the maternity ward described by Kelly (1969, p. 28). If we share Kelly’s (1955, p. 12) analogy of “man-the-scientist”—the view of the person as actively formulating hypotheses about the world, themselves, and others; testing them; and in case revising them in the light of the outcomes—it would be hard not to also see infants as “incipient” scientists. From the standpoint of PCT, it is precisely on the basis of a continuous process of validation or invalidation of anticipations allowed by either verbal or preverbal constructs that the world of children comes to be populated by objects and subjects, themselves included.

8 “Aggressiveness” is defined by Kelly (1955) as “the active elaboration of one’s perceptual field” (p. 508).

9 However, PCT encounters a difficulty in this regard. As defined by Kelly, only adults able to construe to some extent the construction processes of other people, including children, can have an acceptance of them; children are unable to do the same. Therefore, it does not allow to account adequately for the intersubjectivity of the relationship between infant and caregiver. Actually, Kelly’s definitions of role and sociality put undue emphasis on the cognitive functions of deliberation and imagination, as Butt (1998) accurately pointed out. Butt’s proposal of having recourse to Merleau-Ponty’s (2010) phenomenological studies of development in infancy allows the overcoming of such limitations while preserving a compatibility with a constructivist view. Briefly, Merleau-Ponty rejected classical dualist theories of person perception, which postulate that people’s consciousness is enveloped within their bodies: that is, the view that the person is a subject within a body. Starting from the assumption of the interconnectedness of human behavior, of a primitive intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty assumes that others’ consciousness is perceptible to us (children included); we see their expression of intention—not their behavior and then infer intention. We perceive directly their engagement with the world recognizing them as embodied subjects, like ourselves: that is, the person is a body-subject. Such alternative “involves starting off as if it were commonality that is primitive to humankind and individuality that is achieved” (Butt, 1998, p. 112).

10 A “disorder” is defined by Kelly (1955) as “any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation” (p. 831).

11 “Threat” is defined by Kelly (1955) as “the awareness of imminent comprehensive change in one’s core structures” (p. 489).

12 Kelly (1955) gives an explanation in terms of personal security within the context of a construct such as like-mother vs. unlike-mother (pp. 146–151).

13 In previous works (Chiari, 2016a, 2017c) I chose the term “contempt” sometimes used by Ricoeur (2005). Now I prefer the term “disrespect” used by Honneth (1995).

14 “Hostility” is defined by Kelly (1955) as “the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure” (p. 510).

15 According to Kelly (1955), “Constriction occurs when a person narrows his perceptual field in order to minimize apparent incompatibilities” (p. 532). Here I use constriction with reference to the exclusion of some aspects of self from the relational field.

16 “Core constructs” are defined by Kelly (1955) as “those which govern a person’s maintenance processes—that is, those by which he maintains his identity and existence” (p. 482).

17 “Anxiety” is defined by Kelly (1955) as “the recognition that the events with which one is confronted lie outside the range of convenience of one’s construct system” (p. 495).