Response to Layton: Considering the Sociopolitical Context of Dialectical Constructivism

What is commonly missing from psychoanalytic formulations, including my own, that Lynne Layton rightfully challenges us to correct is the locating of the possible dysfunctionality of the individual and the family within the context, not just of a brutally indifferent universe but also of an arguably brutally indifferent economic, political, and institutional environment. I differ with Layton in that I am more prepared to consider possible universals that bear on human experience and moral standards. For example, I would say that “reflection on the foundations of knowledge” trumps nonreflective fundamentalist thinking in capturing the best attitude to assume towards pursuit of truth. Also, the universality of the human tendency to deny death may underlie many diverse cultural belief systems. Nevertheless, Layton challenges us to reflect on how conventional psychoanalytic practices may collude with aspects of our own culture we would do well to try to combat, in ourselves and in our patients, through owning and proactively exercising our moral influence.     

Toward an Integration of Constructivism and Existential Psychotherapy

Constructivism and existential psychology are distinct approaches to therapy that share many important commonalities. Included in the commonalities are a focus on meaning, relationships, change, and experience. We maintain that an existential-constructivist foundation can provide an ideal foundation for integration that can deepen approaches to therapy that resonate with aspects of existential and constructivist therapies. Three approaches to therapy highlight possibilities for integration: caregiver family therapy, equine-facilitated therapy, and substance abuse therapy. Building from these examples, various approaches to integration emerging from constructivism and existentialism can prove fruitful for developing a constructivism-existential psychology integration.     

Response to Commentators on Existential Flourishing

ABSTRACT

In this piece I respond to questions and criticisms raised by commentators on my recent book, Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues (Cambridge University Press, 2019). I argue for an irreducible normative plurality governing our struggle to lead good human lives, and address questions about how to decide what to do in the face of such plurality.     

Rules of Existential Quantification into "Intensional Contexts"

Propositional and notional attitudes are construed as relations (-in-intension) between individuals and constructions (rather than propositrions etc,). The apparatus of transparent intensional logic (Tichy) is applied to derive two rules that make it possible to export existential quantifiers without conceiving attitudes as relations to expressions (sententialism).     

Constructivism and the Inescapability of Moral Choices: A Response to Raskin and Debany

In their article on ethics, Raskin and Debany (this issue Raskin, J. D., &; Debany, A. E. (this issue). The inescapability of ethics and the impossibility of “anything goes”: A constructivist model of ethical meaning making. Journal of Constructivist Psychology. (Reprinted from Ethics in action: Dialogue between knowledge and practice (pp. 13–32), by S. Cipolletta &; E. Gius (Eds.), 2012, Milan, Italy: LED) [Google Scholar]) raise a number of important issues that merit discussion and have implications for a constructivist stance on ethics, an issue that has dogged constructivist and social constructionist theory and has, in the past, been the focus of a good deal of debate. In my response to their article, I focus on two issues before going on to consider what these imply for a constructivist ethics. The first is the status of “reality”; drawing on the work of French philosophers, discursive psychology, and symbolic interactionism, I argue that the constructivist conception of reality has been widely misunderstood and will outline what I regard as a defensible construction of reality. The second issue concerns the relationship between the individual and the social world; drawing again on earlier work in microsociology, I argue that the “constructed” individual must be understood as emerging from the social realm rather than preexisting it, and I argue for personal construct psychology as a candidate for filling the subjectivity “gap” in social constructionism. Finally, I use these conceptualizations of reality and the person to argue for an ethical stance of “radical doubt” for constructivism.     

The Evolutionary Role of Interorganizational Communication: Modeling Social Capital in Disaster Contexts

Employing a community ecology perspective, this study examines how interorganizational (IO) communication and social capital (SC) facilitated organizational recovery after Hurricane Katrina. In‐depth interviews with 56 New Orleans organizations enabled longitudinal analysis and a grounded theory model that illustrates how communication differentiated four phases of recovery: personal emergency, professional emergency, transition, rebuilding. Communicative action taking place across phases corresponds with the evolutionary mechanisms. Most organizations did not turn to interorganizational relationships (IORs) until the transitional phase, during which indirect ties were critical and incoming versus outgoing communication was substantively different. Organizations did not consistently use IO SC until the last phase. This study underlines the fact that organizations and their systems are fundamentally human and (re)constructed through communicative action.     

Reply to Reviews by Slavin,Stein, and Stern

Major points of three reviews—by Malcolm Owen Slavin, Ruth Stein, and Donnel Stern—are highlighted and further elaborated, particularly the broad existential foundations of dialectical constructivism, the importance of dialectical thinking, and the centrality of the struggle with epistemological and moral uncertainty in this perspective. Several counterpoints are formulated—for example, the seemingly paradoxical commitment to a definitive theory of the process, the place of objective facts and universal principles in experience that is fundamentally ambiguous, and the pragmatic necessity for commitment to particular understandings and courses of action in the light of the passage of time and of mortality. Some clinical examples are presented to illustrate the dialectic of ritual and spontaneity as reflected in the tailoring of the frame to suit particular analytic relationships. Precursors of dialectical constructivism in the author's early work are identified.     

Councils as Empowering Contexts: Mobilizing the Front Line to Foster Systems Change in the Response to Intimate Partner Violence

Collaborative approaches to change are common, and though evidence for their effectiveness is equivocal, there is growing support that councils facilitate desired changes in the systems response to intimate partner violence. Questions remain regarding the specific mechanisms by which this change is facilitated, and recent work has focused on examining the intermediate processes through which councils may produce more distal change. One such mechanism relates to the potential of councils to be empowering contexts for their membership, often comprised of front-line providers and responders. The present study examines what factors are positively related to perceived individual empowerment as an outcome for members, and importantly, considers not only perceived council context, but also the perceived organizational contexts in which each council member is employed. Study findings suggest that both contexts-council and organizational-are important when considering the degree to which members are empowered. Specifically, member participation, council leadership, and supportive council and organizational climates are significantly positively related to the degree to which councils function as empowering contexts. However, the effect of belonging to a council with a supportive climate, characterized in particular by shared power in decision-making, is stronger when members are from high organizational support settings versus low support settings.     

Constructivism and Technology Critique: Replies to Critics

1. Thomson's critique: Despite the efforts of his followers to show that Heidegger had a progressive theory of technology, his work is clouded by nostalgia. His positive contribution is a fragmentary opening toward a phenomenology of daily technical practice, which I use to develop de Certeau's distinction between the strategic control of technical systems and their tactical usage by subordinates. Heidegger himself made no such application of his own phenomenological approach. 2. Stump's critique: Can an ontological essentialism and a historically oriented constructivism be combined as Questioning Technologyattempts to do? Stump claims they cannot, but assumes that I accept far more ontological and epistemological baggage from each position than I do. In fact, what I retain from essentialism is primarily the analysis of the basic technical relation to reality, and from constructivism, historical and hermeneutic methods of analysis of the realization of that relation in actual systems and devices. These elements of the two theories are compatible.     

Introducing Science to the Psychology of the Soul: Experimental Existential Psychology

ABSTRACT— Humans live out their lives knowing that their own death is inevitable; that their most cherished beliefs and values, and even their own identities, are uncertain; that they face a bewildering array of choices; and that their private subjective experiences can never be shared with another human being. This knowledge creates five major existential concerns: death, isolation, identity, freedom, and meaning. The role of these concerns in human affairs has traditionally been the purview of philosophy. However, recent methodological and conceptual advances have led to the emergence of an experimental existential psychology directed toward empirically investigating the roles that these concerns play in psychological functioning. This new domain of psychological science has revealed the pervasive influence of deep existential concerns on diverse aspects of human thought and behavior.     

Sex-Role Orientation and the Willingness to Confront Existential Issues

The relationship between sex-role orientation and willingness to confront existential issues was examined. Eighty-eight undergraduates completed the Bem Sex Role Inventoy and Avoidance of Existential Confrontation (AEC) scale. A Sex × Masculinity × Femininity analysis of variance of AEC scores showed that masculine men and feminine women reported the least willingness to confront existential issues. Androgynous men were the most receptive to facing existential issues. These findings are discussed in terms of the defensiveness often evidenced by sex-typed persons and the importance of responding to the existential concerns of young adults struggling to establish a sex-role identity.     

Naming and Exclaiming: Infants' Sensitivity to Naming Contexts

In three experiments, we examined 17-month-olds' acquisition of novel symbols (words and gestures) as names for object categories. Experiment 1 compares infants' extension of novel symbols when they are presented within a familiar naming phrase (e.g., "Look at this [symbol]!") versus presented alone (e.g., "Look! ... [symbol]!") Infants mapped novel gestures successfully in both naming contexts. However, infants mapped novel words only within the context of familiar naming phrases. Thus, although infants can learn both words and gestures, they have divergent expectations about the circumstances under which the 2 symbolic forms name objects. Experiments 2 and 3 test the hypothesis that infants' expectations about the circumstances under which words that name objects are acquired by monitoring how adults indicate their intention to name. By employing a training paradigm, these two experiments demonstrated that infants can infer how an experimenter signals his or her intention to name an object on the basis of a very brief training experience.