SocioDynamic Constructivist Counselling



LECTURES and ARTICLES by Dr. R. Vance Peavy


A SOCIODYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE FOR COUNSELLING

A SocioDynamic Document by R. Vance Peavy 1999-04-10


Introduction

In 1977 I wrote a small book with the title: Adults helping adults: An existential approach to co-operative helping.  It was my first attempt to describe a counselling process which was not an expert oriented procedure in which the counsellor is alienated from the help-seeker by virtue of status and vocabulary.  Instead I attempted to describe a dialectical process of joint-action in which both counsellor and the one seeking help make important reciprocal contributions to the counselling process.  In addition to bringing the idea of joint-action into counselling, I also stressed that counselling is a creative process.  I was beginning to think about how to develop a counselling process in which solutions are created by the cooperation of counsellor and halfback on the assumption that co-invented solutions are often much more useful than formulaic counselling or therapy "interventions" imposed by the counsellor-as-expert.

Earlier (Peavy, 1974) I had written Creative Helping, an article in which I stressed the need to recognize that all actions are contextualized.  Instead of focussing almost exclusively on the psychology of the individual, I believed it necessary to examine agent-context patterns of reciprocal influence in counselling.  Further, I emphasized that counselling process and procedures should not neglect, abandon, or block the creative process in which all people participate to some degree.

I wrote a follow-up article (Peavy, 1979) organized around the idea that the image of humans as homo creator is an extremely hopeful image.  I wrote that in counselling we should regard the individual as capable of "building up his or her life from endless possibilities."  In the article I asked: "Why not try to maximize the latent and actual creativity of the individual within the counselling situation?"  More and more I was adopting the belief that counselling should be a process in which the jointly contributed creativity and cultural know-how of the counsellor and the help-seeker are activated.  It seemed to me that the joint capacities should be used to create solutions which take into account the details of both the particular self and the specific context within which the other and concern are embedded.

In other words, my way of thinking about counselling was transforming from the perspective of individual psychology to a perspective, which was social and dialectical.  I was moving from reliance on generalized and theoretical knowledge to greater use of local, cultural knowledge in producing useful ideas, solutions, and understandings of client difficulties.  Later I would use the term "bricolage" to describe this counsellor-client joint activity of using cultural materials to construct new paths in social life.

My thinking about counselling was crystallizing around the notion that counselling should be a process which helped people become eligible to participate (more fully or more competently) in daily sociocultural life.  This perspective was in sharp contrast with what I had been taught in my own education as a counsellor.  The perspective which I and other counsellors and psychologists had been socialized into was that counselling was a procedure for "changing behavior" and for changing what goes wrong in the heads of people.  On top of that we were exhorted at every turn to adopt a "scientific" attitude in our professional counselling practice and research.  My own experience as a counsellor and counsellor educator, and my reading of the mounting evidence that most counselling and clinical research turns out to be unused (and unuseable) in practice, was fueling a transformation in my own stance toward counselling.  The rest of this article gives some of the details of this transformation and briefly describes a new form of counselling which is designed to more closely fit the needs of people in contemporary social life.

By the late 1970's I had become quite dissatisfied with most extant models of counselling.  From my point of view models of counselling which had been developed during the period extending from the late 1930's to the last quarter of this century were unsatisfactory for at least the three following reasons:
  1. Nearly all counselling and therapy models were based on positivist premises and suffered from reductionism and fragmentation.

  2. The professionalization of counsellors and their elevation to expert-status all too often results in their alienation from help-seekers, especially help-seekers who come from a lower socioeconomic class, and those who are culturally different, or poorly educated.

  3. I had also become acutely aware that psychology, especially abnormal psychology with the accompanying vocabularies of pathology and deficiency, were (and still are) dominant in the thinking of counsellors.  Too often, counsellors as well as psychologists and teachers try to explain and analyze what is going on from the perspective of a "disturbed" or "deficient" individual.  Socio-cultural contexts were being woefully ignored.  Of course so was also the other "camp":  That is, the extreme behaviorists who tended to believe that conditioning forces from the environment told the whole story.  For them, agency was a craze; idea individuals were "responding machines" who were not more than responding to environmental stimulation.

    Neither the individualistic nor the environmental theorists and practitioners had seriously considered the interactive nature of human social life.  I had begun to understand that counselling is not so much a psychological method as it is a social practice or cultural method.  In other words, counselling should be based on cultural hypotheses and principles and should not be presented as a "quasi-scientific" model based either individualistic psychology or environmental conditioning.  I thought that a culture-based counselling process that was construed as a social practice would reduce counsellor-other alienation.  Further, such a move should make counsellor-other cooperation and joint-action much more feasible and meaningful.  However, at that time, I did not know how to implement my ideas in a practical fashion.
As might be expected, I encountered widespread resistance to my ideas from other academics.  The notion that counselling should be moved from a psychological base to a multi-disciplinary or social base, and from scientific pretensions to cultural knowledge was too drastic and revisionary for most colleagues.  In many academic settings, there was, and continues to be, a rather cozy marriage between counselling and psychotherapy.  Both are based on various psychological theories of personality development, deviation, and individual adjustment and both continue to borrow rather heavily from the medical model of curing people.  To my mind, the idea of "cure" is definitely out of place in the context of counselling practice.  Very few help-seekers need to be cured of anything.

Instead they need to make and/or use culturally sensible ideas and actions which will enable them to navigate and participate in everyday social life.  Most people asking for counselling help want to learn how to perform more successfully in everyday living.  Often, they are trying to find, or make, their own compass of meaning that will give purpose to their daily actions.

Finally, many help-seekers are seeking opportunities for "giving voice" to their life stories, issues that concern them, dilemmas that they face.  They do not present behaviors to be changed as much as they present stories of human struggle for meaning and a desire to participate more rewardingly in socio-cultural life.  Many help-seekers are seeking situations which afford them the opportunity to voice "who" they are and want to be; and to tell how they are experiencing life in their particular social space.  By 1985, and from the perspective that I had developed, my claim had become that counselling should be a process of assisting people to become eligible to participate more fully and with more meaning in social life.  I was taking the stance that the processes of learning and construction should replace the processes of behavior modification, curing, and personality shaping or changing which most counselling and therapy models posit as their goals.  Counselling, as I envisioned it, was more of a "meaning-making" enterprise than a "behavior-changing" strategy.

What I wanted counsellors to attend was not how to adjust and change the behaviors of people, but how to interact in culturally sensible ways with help-seekers in the service of the others' expanded capacities for participation in everyday social life, such as: worklife, family life, and school life.  I also was realizing that two aspects of human existence (spirituality and moral choice) were not - or could not be - addressed in most models of counselling.

In North American counselling, spirituality was virtually a forbidden territory, even though for some help-seekers this was the most important part of their lives.  Spiritual issues were considered as "non-scientific" or "too personal", or "mine-fields of prejudice and bias."  Increasingly, I found this barren point of view unacceptable, even disgusting.  More to the point, the most important issues in the lives of many people were not eligible for examination and discussion.

It seemed obvious to me that anyone who was experiencing confusion, ambiguity or conflict about moral or spiritual issues should be able to use counselling as a legitimate place for an intelligent discussion with the counsellor.  Of course I realized that many counsellors would find this view unsettling, either because they had been indoctrinated in the belief that these issues were off-base, or because they had not developed a reflective perspective of their own on such matters.  To me this seemed a matter for counsellor education to address so that counsellors could come to the counselling encounter better prepared for moral and spiritual dialogue.


SocioDynamic Counselling is born

For all of the reasons I have outlined above, by the late 1980s I was prepared to construct a counselling perspective which would minimize or eliminate some the features of conventional counselling approaches which I no longer believed to be sensible or tenable.  My initial attempts to seriously formulate a revised perspective for counselling began with the publication of two pamphlets: Credo for counsellors: SocioDynamic counselling (1988) and SocioDynamic counselling (1988a).  I coined the word "SocioDynamic" to convey two meanings: "Socio" refers to the view that daily existence is social-humans are relational or social beings.  Socio is derived from the Latin socialis meaning ally or companion.  It also stems from the Greek aossein, meaning to "help" or "stand by another."

We are who we are, think what we think, and do what we do, as a consequence of the patterns of social interaction in which we participate.  The faulty dichotomy of individual vs. society should be set aside.  We are at once both social beings and agent ("having an ability to act") beings.  We cannot be one without the other.

Language is a good example.  Language exists prior to the birth of the person.  Following birth, through interaction with parents and others, the growing-up begins to appropriate language.  It is best to think of language as a system of cultural tools.  Bit by bit the tools of language move from the social interaction surrounding and engaging the child to the consciousness of the child.  What was first in the parent and in the child-parent interaction becomes a working tool internally for the child.  The flow of language and the use of language are both part of our socio-cultural "situation" and at the same time a set of tools which the individual employs to interact with others in a meaningful and competent way.  In other words, language in the form of utterances, words, symbols, metaphors, maps, drawings, and texts are cultural tools - or social mediators of experience.

As I have come to understand language in this way - as cultural tools - I have realized that counsellors would be much better equipped to understand, assist, and function if they saw that their basic working tools were different aspects of language rather than psychological methods and interventions.  I moved from a psychological to a sociocultural base in my thinking about counselling.  "Dynamic", which derives from the Greek root dynamikos, has many meanings.  Those which seem especially relevant to my purpose are:  "an energized, interactive system"; "an aesthetic equilibrium which becomes unstable upon separation of its parts" (I wish to emphasize the need for a holistic attitude toward people and their lives and to reduce the tendency toward separation of subject/object); "continuous movement", "relating to power."


Consolidating new ideas and constructing a SocioDynamic perspective

In 1988 I initiated a research project to investigate how counselling should be revised and what revisions would be most preferred in order to make counselling resonant with postmodern, post-industrial society.  This project covered a period of five years and produced a framework for a new form of counselling, which initially had the title, "Constructivist career counselling".  Subsequently this "new look" in counselling was named SocioDynamic Counselling.  Since it was developed as a holistic counselling perspective that unified five sectors of self and social life, the qualifier "career" was dropped as redundant.

The sectors of self and social life to which the SocioDynamic perspective applies are:
  1. learning/worklife
  2. personal/relational life
  3. spirituality
  4. health/body
  5. creativity/recreational
Three assumptions of the new counselling perspective are:

Assumption No. 1:  Counselling as a discipline and as a practice should be moved from a positivist base to a constructivist base.  This implies a different perspective on what knowledge is, on how we get knowledge, and on how knowledge is used in the practice of everyday life.
  1. Ontology-Acceptance of the principle of multiple realities.  This means that local, particular, constructed realities must not be supplanted by probabilistic, generalized knowledge as advocated by positivism.  This stance legitimizes cultural variations, gender differences, life space differences, and places many practical truth claims in the domain of cultural sensibility rather than scientific proof.

  2. Epistemology-shifting from a dualist/objectivist belief to a participatory, created knowledge belief.  We do not observe reality from an objective, detached position; we create realities through participation in whatever it is that we choose to call reality.  As counsellors, we do not know from an objectivist, expert stance; we do know (just like those we seek to help) from a culturally participative activity.

  3. Methodology-shifting from scientific hypotheses and quantitative, rational analysis to sociocultural study methods of analysis.  This implies that counsellors in their practice should adopt a phenomenological, dialogical, hermeneutic stance for describing the particulars of the counselling process and relationship, and for describing the life space of the other.
Assumption No. 2:  Counselling should be situated in the context of post-modernity.  This means a shift in emphasis from an intellectual position which favors the accumulation of authoritative knowledge and generalization to a focus on complexity, interrelationships, uniqueness, invention, and local knowledge (Rosenau, 1992, 172-173).  A post-modern stance means giving up meta-narratives such as beliefs in the primacy of science as the only legitimate route to knowledge, the certainty of "progress", and foundational thinking in general.

Assumption No. 3:  Counselling should be made sensible within the context of social life.  This means adjusting to the requirements of a de-traditionalizing world (Heelas, Lash, & Morris, 1996) taking into account the post-industrial elements of increased intercultural mixing, the transitional nature of working life (Hage & Powers, 1992), the increasing speed and unpredictability of socioeconomic change and the globalization of communication and economic systems (Giddens, 1991).  It also means revising ways of thinking about categories essential to counselling such as the self, relation, and meaning (Peavy, 1998).

By 1993 I had consolidated my thinking and had solved a number of conceptual and practical issues concerning what 21st century counselling should be like.  I was ready to begin presenting SocioDynamic Counselling as a new form of counselling customized for intellectual and social conditions that are prevailing as a new century begins.  I secured a Canadian Copyright on the term, "SocioDynamic Counselling."  This would allow me to present a Canadian counselling invention that could be named as a clear alternative to other, already existing forms of counselling.  I am not interested in "proving" that SocioDynamic Counselling is more effective than other forms of counselling.

I take the position that when we are dealing with human thinking and feeling, we are dealing largely with language; human life is linguistic life.  Our tools for construction of distinctly human patterns of living are human utterances, sentences, words, and symbols.  Human languages are themselves human creations.  In counselling as in living, generally we are dealing with linguistic descriptions of the world, our cultures and institutions, our relations, ourselves.

While there is a natural world "out there", what we as humans mainly live by and with is linguistic descriptions.  Descriptions are not "out there."  They are human creations and interpretations.  The "world out there" does not speak.  Only we do.  The human self is created by the use of vocabulary.  Languages are made, not found.  Selves, in the sense of symbolic meaning, are made, and do not exist as essences, waiting to be found, diagnosed, or measured.

Instead of trying to prove by experimentation and quantitative evaluation that the SocioDynamic vocabulary is more "effective" or more "true" than other entrenched counselling vocabularies what I try to do is describe and redescribe the elements of counselling in new ways.  In this way I wish to create patterns of linguistic behavior which will be appealing to a rising generation of counsellors.

I wish to tempt the rising generation to adopt the language game called "SocioDynamic Counselling."

The appeal of this new vocabulary may promote the search for new forms of nonlinguistic action and behavior thus leading to new forms of counselling practice, new ways of being a counsellor and new ways of making meaningful paths in culture.  In this way counselling as a humanly created praxis for helping others has a chance to evolve intelligently in the context of new and changing conditions of intellectual and social life.

The SocioDynamic perspective, which is philosophical, sociological, and poetic, as well as psychological, says: "Try thinking this way" "Try asking and following new and interesting questions" "Which circumferences, contexts and texts of meaning will help us most with this practical ambiguity or concern?"

The SocioDynamic perspective does not encourage doing the same old things in the same old ways.  It suggests that if we stop doing those things, and try doing something else, we may be constructively surprised, amazed, and inspired at the results.  It is my own intellectual stance that ideas about counselling both as a process and a practice are always "ideas in progress".  I believe that all ideas are unfinalizeable.  Even the best idea in the world about counselling is still a "developing idea".  The implication of this intellectual stance for counselling is that whatever it is that we think about counselling, whatever our favored ideas may be, we should not regard them as the "final word", but as provisional signposts.  I understand humans to live by a "fuzzy logic".  Contrary to the foundationalist-essentialist stance, I believe that most people actually live by cognitive approximations, intuited patterns, and emotional flurries, and not by proven or pre-ordained certainties.

Of course many people try desperately, and insist that others settle on certainties and truths and then live accordingly.  Increasingly, this certainty-based perspective is not tenable in postmodern social life.  Instead we are more likely to make sense with those we help, and to ourselves, if we see our ideas as provisional, under development, as being dynamic and non-linear.  This makes for an improvisational approach to human action, and to counselling, but it allows counsellors to remain close to the particulars of any sociocultural situation and to the ongoing life-experience of people.

The SocioDynamic perspective does not offer arguments against the other counselling vocabularies that it wishes to replace with a new vocabulary.  As an advocate of the SocioDynamic perspective I strive to make it attractive by showing how it resonates with cultural knowledge which people use as a guide for living and solving problems.  The process of counselling should be mainly constructed from living experience.  I try to use ordinary language for my descriptions.  I try to resist the intrusion of theoretical pretensions into the sensibilities of people who are using cultural prescriptions and cultural knowledge in their efforts to understand and resolve existential problems of everyday life.


Materializing SocioDynamic Counselling

Counselling, similar to therapy, is often discussed as a "talking cure" or "merely words and feelings."  I believe that it is of considerable importance to establish a material basis for counselling.  Introducing the concept of counselling skill as the use of cultural tools is a big step in the direction of materialization. The production of texts, transcripts, recordings, videos and the creation of maps in the counselling process are all rather obvious examples of materialization.  Cultural tools by themselves cannot do anything.  They only take on function when agents use them.  Agents without cultural tools cannot perform in significant ways either.

For meaningful action to occur, agents require tools and tools require agents.

A life space map, for example, is an excellent example of a cultural tool (the map) which exists in time and space beyond the moments of its creation, thus allowing for its characterization as a socially created artifact (material object).  This affords us a means for grasping the mental appropriations of the other.  The map is a tool (sign) which permits the agent to say, "this is what I mean" and for "this is what I mean" to become a materialized object which lives on after the conversation of the counselling encounter is complete.  The fact of the map's existence as a material object gives the counsellor and other an enormous advantage over "just talking."

In my view, the use of material objects as cultural tool results in changes in agents.  As counsellors we should be concerned with the development in others of skills in using cultural tools.  The development of such skill requires acting with, and reacting to, the material properties of tools.  Without material properties, there is nothing to act with, or react to, hence we have the phenomenon of counselling as "just talk" which soon vanishes with little or no trace when the conversation is ended.

SocioDynamic Counselling may be best described as a language game in which metaphors are used for: "this is what happens", "this is how it happens", and "this is how people feel influenced by what is going on."  It is a language game in which social artifacts are produced in the form of maps, signs, diagrams, charts, icons, drawings, letters, recordings, videos, journal entries, collages, inscribed metaphors, and written scenarios and characterizations.  These artifacts become cultural tools for the purpose of identifying mental appropriations, especially meanings.  They allow the counsellor and other to transcend the "black box" phenomenon so prevalent in conversations which is indicated by such statements as "you know what I mean?" or conversely, "I know what you mean."

If we really do use new vocabularies, there are no antecedent criteria for comparing the new with the old.  The basic question is:  Are we willing to face up to the contingency of language?  Can we accept that it is a human creation and does not express any intrinsic, essential truth or universal reality?  While we can compare one vocabulary with another (this often leads to trivial quibbling), we cannot say that one vocabulary gets at the "facts" or "truth" better or more effectively than others do.

I take the SocioDynamic vocabulary to be a set of cultural tools, a way of getting things done.  It is not a medium for arriving at the true nature of anything, or for determining the effectiveness of counselling methods.  It is a cultural tool for doing the work we have chosen to call "helping" on a personal level, or what we refer to as "counselling."  SocioDynamic Counselling is not grounded in theories of personality, motivation, or behavior.  It is grounded in the concrete descriptions of what people do, how they do what they do, why they do these things, and what their actual sociocultural situations are.

Since 1994 I have been able to organize and implement a number of projects which have furthered the materialization of SocioDynamic Counselling:
  1. Writing a counsellors' book:  SocioDynamic Counselling (Peavy,1997/98)

  2. Writing Trainer Guidebook for Constructivist Counsellor Training  (Peavy, 1999)

  3. Co-sponsoring the Project for At Risk Youth using SocioDynamic Counselling in Toronto, under the auspices of the Toronto School Board (1996-98)

  4. Providing training for counsellors in Denmark under the auspices of Radet for Uddannelses- og Erhrvsvejledning (RUE) including the translation of my book into Danish (Konstruktiistisk vejledning:  Teori og metode (1998)

  5. Providing training for counsellors in Finland under the auspices of Ministry of Labor including the translation of my book into Finnish (Sosiodynamminen ohjaus: konstruktivistinen nakokulma 21 Vuosisadan ohjaustyohon (1999)

  6. Providing training for Swedish counsellors under the auspices of DOCIL including the translation of my book into Swedish (Konstruktivisk vagledning. Stockholm: Trinom forlag)

  7. Intitiating a cooperative project with George Brown College in Toronto in offering a certificate program in Constructivist Career Counselling (1996-present)

  8. Developing and implementing a constructivist peer career counselling training program for the Canadian Steel Trades Employees Commission in Toronto  This project was concluded in 1996 after a group of 30 counsellors had received training.  Over a five year period about 6,000 unemployed steelworkers received group and or individual counselling for worklife planning

  9. Instituting a Mentoring Project for career counsellors in the Public Service Commission of the Yukon Territorial Government assisting to implement constructivist career counselling in the worker re-integration project
These nine projects constitute a strategy materializing SocioDynamic Counselling.  In each project I am attempting through direct instruction and through mentoring to educate other counsellor educators and trainers about SocioDynamic concepts and practices so that they can help to disseminate these ideas.


REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M.(1981).  The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M.Bakhtin. Ed. M.Holquist; trans. C.Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Berger, P.L., & Luckmann, T. (1966).  The social construction of reality.  Garden City, NY: Anchor press

Bruner, J. (1990).  Acts of meaning.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Burke, K. (1966).  Language as symbolic action:  Essays on life, literature, and method. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Carlsen, M.B. (1988).  Meaning-making:  Therapeutic processes in adult development. NY: W.W. Norton.

Gergen, K. (1991).  The saturated self:  Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life.  NY: Basic Books.

Gibson, J. (1978).  The ecological approach to visual perception.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Giddens, A. (1991).  Modernity and self-Identity.  Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hage, J., & Powers, C. (1992).  Post-industrial lives:  Roles and relationships in the 21st century.  Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Hayek, F.A. (1952).  The sensory order.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heelas, P., Lash, S., & Morris, P. (Eds.) (1996) De-traditionalization.  London:  Blackwell Publishers.

Mahoney, M. (1991).  Human change processes:  The scientific foundations of psychotherapy.  NY: Basic Books.

Mills, C.Wright (1959).  The sociological imagination.  London: Oxford University Press.

Franklin, C., & Nurius, P. (1998).  Constructivism in practice.  Milwaukee, WI:  Families International Inc.

Peavy, R.V. (1974).  Creative helping.  The Journal of Creative Behavior. 8, 166-176.

Peavy, R.V. (1977).  Adults helping adults:  An existential approach to cooperative counselling.  Victoria,B.C.:  privately printed.

Peavy, R.V. (1979).  Therapy and creativity:  A dialogue.  The Journal of Creative Behavior. 13, 60-71.

Peavy, R.V.(1988).  Credo for counsellors:  SocioDynamic counselling. Malmo: Sweden: MITT FORLAG.

Peavy, R.V. (1988).  SocioDynamic counselling.  Victoria, BC:  Department of Psychological Foundations, University of Victoria.

Peavy, R.V. (1998).  A new look at interpersonal relations in counselling:  Educaitonal and Vocational Guidance Bulletin, 62, 45-51.

Rosenau, P. (1992).  Post-modernism and the social sciences.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Sexton, T., & Griffin, B. (Eds.) (1997).  Constructivist thinking in counselng practice, research and training. NY:  Teachers College Press.

Watzlawick, P. (Ed.). (1984).  The invented reality:  Contributions to constructivism. NY:  Norton.

Wertsch, J.V. (1981). (Ed.).  The concept of activity in Soviet psychology.  Armonk,NY:  M. E. Sharpe.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1981).  The instrumental method in Soviet psychology.

In J.V. Wertsch, (Ed.).  The concept of activity in Soviet psychology.  Armonk, NY:  M.E. Sharpe, pp. 134-143.


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