Oh, that's right; you instigated (intitiated?? stimululated???) all of
this.
I hesitated to throw in some examples of what I regard as
fundatmentally incompatible constructs taken from Jung and Kelly -- largely
because as I cleaned out my library I must have jettisoned all of the original
work of Jung that I had collected. Thus, I hesitated to give an example on
grounds that I might misquote Jung.
I did, however, consult my trustworthy copy of Joe Rychlak's
PERSONALITY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY . (I say, trustworthy, in that I know that Joe
has carefully documented all of his citations and elaborations.)
Okay -- Considering PCP's fundamental postulate: A PERSON'S PROCESSES
ARE PSYCHOLOGICALLY CHANNELIZED BY THE WAYS IN WHICH HE ANTICIPATES EVENTS. I
assume that a committed PCP advocate has carefully assessed the implicative
structure (epistemological and ontological) that underlies this proposition. I
am not sure of whether or not I would get agreement on the what one might take
those to be. Nevertheless, to me it says that the construct system operates to
maintain stability -- and the system's stability depends on the successful
anticipation of events. One might take the gyroscope as a metaphor for the ways
in which the system is "powered." After a great deal of considered thought,
study, contrast to other systems, etc., I find no reason to alter Kelly's
statement; "Instead of postulating an inert substance, a step which would
inevitable lead to the necessity of establishing, as a corollary, the existence
of some sort of mental energy, the subject of psychology is assumed at the
outset to be a process" (PPC, (1991, p. 33).
Supporting this fundamental postulate [whose motive principle, I
believe, is based on a thorough contextualist ontology], Kelly offers the
construction corollary and the Individuality Corollary -- the latter stating;
"persons differ from each other in their constructions of events."
How can one integrate Jung's notions of INSTINCTS and ARCHETYPE with
these formulations? I quote Rychlaks quote of Jung on INSTINCT: "According to
my view all those psychic processes over whose energies the conscious has no
disposal come within the concept of instincts." How would one integrate the
concept of energy, as experessed here, with the PCP's angle on motivation?
"A person's processes are psychologically CHANNELIZED by the ways in which he
anticipates events." Is anticipation based on channelization by INSTINCTS?
Looking at another metaphor, again quoting Rychlak's quote of Jung (p. 194),
the meaning of ARCHETYPES was "*a priori* categories of functioning."
Anticipation is channelized by *a priori* categories????????? Rychlak says that
"Jung once used the metaphor of a deep riverbead to explain what he meant by
the ARCHETYPE. Though past evolution washed such beds into our psyces, not
all of us experience their influenc. Not until a mental thunderstorm -- a
challenge, facincation, some problem -- empties ints contents into all of the
available channels will this deepened pocket make itself known, as the shall
stream of mental activity swells into a might river, rumbling deep and quite
out of its usual character" (Rychlak, p. 194).
How does this square with the ontological and epistemological bases
for PCP's Fundamental Postulate and the supporting individuality corollary?
People's processes are channelized by the ways in which they anticipate events,
untl the anticipations run into the evolutionarily created riverbeds, whereupon
the processes are channelized by the riverbeds -- which exist in the collective
unconscious??????????????? At that point, people are not likely to differ
from each other in their construction of events?????????????
[My categorizion of Jung as a formist/mechanist comes largely from
consideration of these concepts -- ARCHETYPE: Real "forms" (found in the
collective unconscious as a result of their transmission through the protein
structures we construe as "genes" -- *discovered* by Jung. "Jung always
insisted that he had *discovered* the archetypes . . . They were not *thought
up* by him -- as indeed it would be impossible to do -- but rather identified
and tentatively namewd only after years of painstaking research" (Rychlak, p.
194). Can we call that FORMISM, or what???? INSTINCT: (see above quote)
Energies from "outside the system." Rychlak tries to argue that Jung's notion
of instinct should be seen as teleological rather than mechanistic. Latter in
his text Rychlak discusses libido as ENERGY: "If we repress some bad intention,
then the libido of the rejected alternative is not simply lost to the psyche
when the repression takes place. The repressed alternative has set loos a
certain amoung of free libido in the mind, even as the chose alternative puts
its libido to work by framing a conscious intention" (p. 198). I have
difficulty seeing how this set of concepts differs from the kind of "push-pull"
theories which were set loose by the stimulus response associationists!!!]
Okay, after all that, I will no longer experience "guilt" [my
construction of putative inputs generated by the arousal generated by my
failure to enact anticipatory behavior which might evoke validation of my self
-role as a personality theorist; not a "built in" emotion generated by stimuli
which indicate that I have been a BAD person].
Jim Mancuso
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