Thinking in opposites: The psychologies of Carl Gustav Jung and George Kelly

Towards a dialogic contact

Bakhtin (1986) characterised scholarship as a special kind of dialogue consisting of interrelations between texts and a context created by the scholar analysing them. Insofar as a text “lives only by coming into contact with another text (with context) . . . this contact is a dialogic contact between texts (utterances) and not a mechanical contact of ‘oppositions’” (p. 162). A mechanical contact between the texts of Jung and Kelly would be the observation that Jung’s postulation of an archetypal structure is incompatible with Kelly’s postulation of an idiographic structure. Kelly (1955/1991a) stated his basic theory in terms of a fundamental postulate—“A person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the way in which [they] anticipate events” (p. 32)—and 11 corollaries describing characteristics of personal constructs systems, which rest on contrasts identified by the person. The fundamental postulate of analytical psychology could be stated thus: the unconscious exists in a compensatory relation to the conscious mind. Creating a dialogic contact between the two psychologies does not mean seeking to reconcile their opposition. It means adopting a critical distance from which to evaluate their divergences as well as parallels.

Comparing frameworks is staple scholarship; and yet scholarly juxtapositions of Kelly and Jung are scarce and go little beyond citations. Introducing his own theory of the dialogical self to Jungian audiences, Hermans (1993) listed Kelly alongside several psychologists who posited opposites in the self and reported Kelly’s dichotomy corollary (quoted later below) but did not critique either Kelly or Jung. Jones (2001) cited Kelly in passing apropos Jung’s concept of psychic energy. The marginality of both perspectives in the academia may account for the impasse. Butt (2008) commented that typical depictions of personal constructs psychology (PCP) in introductory textbooks are “frozen in the past” (p. 51). The same could be said about textbook depictions of Jung’s theory. A fuller account (space permitting) would acknowledge advances in both psychologies beyond their founders’ works. Analytical psychology has been internationally strong, not only throughout the “Western” world but also in Japan and recently China (Kawai, 2010; Kirsch, 2000; Wang et al., 2020). PCP is a smaller movement but attracts psychotherapists worldwide.

Interestingly, there is no evidence of dialogue between them. It is hardly surprising that Kelly is not cited in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, most of which were written when Kelly was still growing up. However, I have not come across engagements with PCP in contemporary Jungian contexts. Conversely, Jung is mentioned only once in Kelly’s two-volume book: “When the writings of Jung became known in American educational circles, many teachers began to act more consistently like introverts. When the work of Adler was imported . . .” and so forth, anecdotally listing influences on people (Kelly, 1955/1991b, p. 151). Procter and Winter (2020) do not mention Jung in their state-of-the-art book on PCP. The disparity between the two frameworks may account for the absence of crossovers in clinical settings. Kelly’s (1955/1991a) contention that a “person is not victim of [their] biography but . . . may be enslaved by [their] interpretation of it” (p. 144) guides clinical practice aiming to help clients reinterpret their lives. Kelly and his followers have devised numerous methods for investigating individuals’ construal of their worlds, most famously the repertory grid. The Jungian premise that individuation (self-realisation) entails the integration of conscious and unconscious elements guides clinical practice exploring patients’ unconscious through dream interpretation and “active imagination” techniques (e.g., painting, sand play).

Jung’s model is a web of dichotomies: the conscious/unconscious; ego/shadow; anima/animus; extravert/introvert types; rational/irrational functions of consciousness; thinking/feeling (the rational axis); sensation/intuition (the irrational axis). Archetypes are each characterised by positive and negative motifs (e.g., the “loving and terrible” mother). The following does not review those dualities partly due to constraints of space and partly since there are no comparable elements in PCP. The ecumenical urge to bring together incommensurable perspectives would be served, not by simply reviewing them side by side, but by identifying dimensions underlying their divergences as well as convergences, for example: (a) the mode of thinking that is of primary interest (the next section expands); (b) the locus of functional dichotomies (discussed subsequently with attention to Jung’s “complexes” and Kelly’s “constructs”); (c) conceptions of the driving dynamic and processes of intrapersonal change and the necessity of theorising an unconscious in this context (discussed under “forms of motion”); and (d) the relation of the psychological to the social (the penultimate section takes a look).

Two kinds of thinking

The chapter titled “Two Kinds of Thinking” opens Jung’s (1912/1919) monograph and its revision (Jung, 1952/1956). The two kinds are directed thinking (reality-oriented, speech-based, and thus communicative in origin, and often intentional) and associative thinking, which is image-based, fantasising, and dreaming. Associative thinking, according to Jung, involves the conscious organisation of unconscious material, and its products illustrate “certain tendencies in the personality which are not yet recognised or are recognised no longer” (1952/1956, §44–45). Whereas Jung’s model pivots on the postulation of this mode, Kelly’s model pivots on a mode closer to “directed” thinking (up to a point), as will be discussed later in this section.

Jung’s distinction of the two modes contributed to a debate in the early 1910s concerning the organisation of thought processes. Other participants included Bleuler, Silberer, and Freud (Jones, 2007). The clinical imperative was to establish discontinuities between “normal” and pathological thinking, but the psychiatrists did not relegate fantasising per se to pathology. It was widely regarded as a basic mode underlying artistic creativity and more. Wundt distinguished ideas “supplied to consciousness by the direct perceptions of daily life” from what he called “mythological thinking,” namely ideas originating “in feeling, in emotional processes which are projected outward into the environment,” and representing the “world of imagination, projected from [one’s] own emotional life into external phenomena” (Wundt, 1916, as cited in Jones, 2007, p. 40). Jung quoted William James towards his own conceptual definition of associative thinking:

Much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by another, of a sort of spontaneous reverie of which it seems likely enough that the higher brutes should be capable. This sort of thinking leads nevertheless to rational conclusions both practical and theoretical. … As a rule, in this sort of irresponsible thinking, the terms which fall to be coupled together are empirical concretes, not abstractions. (James, 1890, as cited in Jung, 1952/1956, §18)

Jung (1952/1956) added that, in such thinking, “image piles on image, feeling on feeling” and there is “an ever-increasing tendency to shuffle things about and arrange them not as they are in reality” (§19).

Both James and Jung underlined this mode’s spontaneity, synthesising function, and lack of reliance on language. Jung’s quotation, however, redacted James’s (1890b) embedded proposition that the “links between the terms are either ‘contiguity’ or ‘similarity,’ and with a mixture of both these things we can hardly be very coherent” (p. 325). James was identifying a kind of thinking characterised by the progressive condensation of thought through free associations. He illustrated it anecdotally: seeing a sunset could make someone with a “prosaic mind” fall into a reverie of actual memories (“the vessel’s deck from which I saw one last summer, the companions of my voyage, my arrival into port, etc.”) whilst someone with a “fanciful, poetic, or witty” mind may think of “solar myths, of Hercules’ and Hector’s funeral pyres, of Homer . . . the Greek alphabet, etc.” (p. 325). Both reveries make connections that progressively lead away from the actual sunset (James’s point). Jung, who wrote extensively about sun myths, inquired why people created myths in the first place. His answer: “the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious” (Jung, 1928/1961c, §325). The above excerpt he quoted from James served him towards identifying the dissociation from reality that occurs in dreaming, fantasising, and mythmaking.

Corresponding to directed and associative thinking respectively, Jung (1921/1971) distinguished between sign (an expression that stands for a known thing) and symbol, defined as “the best possible expression at the moment for a fact as yet unknown or only relatively known, . . . standing for something that is only divined and not yet clearly conscious” (§817). Jungian analysts Maoz and Arbit (2010) illustrated the symbolic significance of images through the case of “Dana,” a 24-year-old victim of serious sexual abuse by family members since she was 4 years old. During a therapy session, she angrily sketched a tree, black and without foliage, saying, “This is a shitty drawing. Everything is dead in this drawing. Burnt to a crisp” (p. 22). Then she drew a second tree, similarly without foliage but with a touch of red on the branches, saying, “Here’s another tree. It looks a bit better. It’s not completely burnt. It has a bit of red” (p. 23). The authors commented that despite being burnt, this image introduced a healing dimension into the therapy, for trees typically represent a nurturing, protective, and supportive principle. Whether something is a symbol (in Jung’s sense) depends only partly on its objective content. If we deliberately draw a tree to represent nurturing (e.g., as a logo), it would be a sign, standing for something known. Dana’s trees were the best possible expression of her anticipation of healing.

Whereas Jung focused on fantasising, Kelly’s theorising concerns a reality-oriented attitude. He likened the individual to an intuitive scientist who makes predictions and tests these hypotheses against empirical reality:

[Humans] look at [their] world through transparent patterns or templates which [they] create and then attempt to fit over the realities of which the world is composed. . . . Let us give the name constructs to these patterns that are tentatively tried on for size. (Kelly, 1955/1991a, p. 7)

In Kelly’s (1955/1991a) usage, the term construct denotes “a way in which some things are construed as being alike and yet different from others” (p. 74). The term construing denotes a cognitive process whereby the person observes “features in a series of elements which characterize some of the elements and are particularly uncharacteristic of others” (p. 35) towards creating a mental structure—a personal constructs system—within which things gain meaning.

Unlike Jung’s “directed thinking,” however, Kelly’s “construing” is initially preverbal (a baby learns to discriminate things that feel good versus unpleasant, for instance), therefore it is unintentional, and serves one’s orientation (as opposed to being communicative in origin). Construing may cover much of human understanding but arguably sidesteps what Jung called associative thinking. Whereas construing can be located in the interface between the mind and the “outside” world, associative thinking forms an interface between the conscious self and one’s “inside” world. This divergence of emphasis is not a theoretical disagreement (focusing on construing does not require us to reject fantasising, and vice versa) though it might impact on clinical practice, for example, Jungian analysts are typically interested in their patients’ dreams, PCP practitioners are not.

Complexes and constructs

Jung and Kelly posited “opposites” as a pivotal feature of the personality architecture but differed in viewing these as dualities (Jung) or contrasts (Kelly) and regarding the relevant level of analysis. Kelly’s conception of bipolar constructs could be likened to bricks with which we build our houses (each brick has dichotomous dimensions). Jung’s archetypes theory suggests that we are born with the same blueprint for the house into which we grow. Opposites inhere in the accessibility versus inaccessibility of particular complexes to consciousness: the psyche is “a divided whole” whose separate parts are “relatively independent, so much so that certain parts of psyche never become associated with the ego at all, or very rarely” (Jung, 1948/1961e, §582). By analogy, a person (ego) cannot be simultaneously in two rooms. This section expands these points.

Jung developed his theory of the complexes in the 1900s before hitting upon the idea of the collective unconscious. Later, inspired by a dream he had in 1909, he likened the psyche to a historically layered house, from top-floor modernity down through medieval and ancient foundations to a prehistorical cave: “That would be the picture of our psychic structure” (Jung, 1931, as cited in Jones, 2007, p. 85). He thus added an archetypal substratum but retained the notion of complexes as emotionally toned constellations that constitute the personal unconscious. Content-wise, complexes are idiographic (individual-specific) since they constitute the personal unconscious. In accordance with Jung’s postulation of an archetypal structure, however, this is like saying that people who live in identical houses furnish them differently.

In contrast, personal constructs systems are wholly idiographic since their architectures are separately built by each individual, even if their constructions are similar. The commonality corollary— “to the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, [their] psychological processes are similar to those of the other person”—is followed with the qualification, “we have not said that if one person has experienced the same events as another, [they] will duplicate the other’s psychological processes” (Kelly, 1955/1991a, p. 63). The qualification eschews a deterministic view. Individuals could arrive at similar constructions based on different past experiences and, conversely, similar past experiences could lead individuals to different constructions. The significance of specific constructs depends on their implications for the person:

They are ways of construing the world. They are what enables [humans], and lower animals too, to chart a course of behaviour, explicitly formulated or implicitly acted out, verbally expressed or utterly inarticulate, consistent with other courses of behaviour or inconsistent with them, intellectually reasoned or vegetatively sensed. (Kelly, 1955/1991a, p. 7)

For Kelly, the self is a construct like any other since differentiating self/not-self is intrinsic to navigating one’s way in the world. It should be noted that PCP nevertheless implies an agentic self, an “I” navigating “me” in the world.

Warning against reducing Kelly’s concept of constructs to intellectually drawn discriminations, Procter (2021) stresses that “the construct is at once perceptual, emotional, concerned with action, change, narrative and, of course, personal . . . [and] embodies the holistic nature of experience” (p. 34). The bipolarity of constructs is nevertheless the linchpin of PCP. The dichotomy corollary states, “a person’s construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs” (Kelly, 1955/1991a, p. 41). Proposing that this “lends itself to binary mathematical analysis”—and since the use of binary codes in computing “has forced scientists to reconsider the mathematical structure of knowledge itself”—Kelly opined that PCP was “in full accord with this modern trend in scientific thinking” (pp. 44–45). Kelly’s theory centres on how individuals parse their world based on past experiences. Any given experience is holistic, but experiences differ in terms of qualia (how it “feels”). Experiencing some things as pleasurable and other things as painful, for instance, would dispose one’s anticipation of future experiences.

Kelly (1955/1991a) further pointed out that the elements under comparison must belong to the same broad category. His example: “A and B are men, C is a woman, and O is the time of day. We abstract an aspect of A, B and C which we may call sex. . . . Sex is not applicable to O, the time of day; at least most of us would not so abstract it” (p. 42). Constructs therefore have a range of convenience (Kelly’s phrase). It could be quibbled that his example is apt in English but not in languages in which every noun has a gender. To Hebrew speakers, if the time of day is morning or evening, it would be masculine like A and B and therefore unlike C. This does not undermine Kelly’s point. My example illustrates a condition under which (grammatical) gender has a wider range of convenience than it has in English. Towards asserting the universality of dichotomies even within class categories, Kelly gave the example of the colour red; despite being a class concept, red contrasts other colours (p. 43). Eliciting someone’s discrimination between elements of a similar kind, however, channels the construing process into conventional associations.

To recall Dana’s case, it was the way that image piled on image, feeling on feeling, that conferred the meaning of healing on her use of red. Dreams produce bizarre combinations of elements, and yet the juxtaposition (according to Jung) could communicate something meaningful about the dreamer’s subjective situation. Hence, “The question we must ask is: to what meaning do the individual associations A, B, C point, when taken in conjunction with the manifest dream-content?” (Jung, 1957/1961a, §148). Jung attributed dream images to autonomous complexes having their say in the absence of the conscious ego’s control. Complexes can make their existence known also in intrusive thoughts, slips of the tongue, ill-timed forgetfulness, inexplicable emotional reactions, and similar phenomena. The kind of knowledge that may be derived through analysing such phenomena cannot be rendered into the kind of binary mathematical analysis to which Kelly referred.

Jung’s definition of autonomous complex denotes the constellation of ideas and affects that reflects a holistically experienced subjective situation:

The “feeling-toned complex” . . . is the image of a certain psychic situation which is strongly accentuated emotionally and is, moreover, incompatible with the habitual attitude of the consciousness. This image has a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness and, in addition, a relatively high degree of autonomy. (Jung, 1934/1961b, §201)

The word “image” in Jung’s usage has both its ordinary meaning of concrete imagery and the special meaning of “a condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole, and not merely, nor even predominantly, of unconscious contents” (Jung, 1921/1971, §745). According to Kelly, as seen, our personal constructs enable us to chart a course of behaviour. According to Jung, autonomous complexes may contradict or interfere with the path we chart for ourselves. Jung (1935/1976) told the case of a 40-year-old headmaster who was offered a university post. The man did not feel in need of advice about his career; he approached Jung about a series of troubling dreams, such as witnessing a train he was about to catch ascending too fast around a bend and derail, and other scenarios that end disastrously. He ignored Jung’s advice that the dreams were warning him that he wasn’t ready for the career move. The path he had consciously plotted for himself led him to accept the university post, and 3 months later, he suffered a nervous breakdown and lost that job.

Jung’s (1954/1959a) aforementioned statement, “There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites,” might sound like something Kelly would say; yet it opens a paragraph that concludes, “Nothing can exist without its opposite . . . Consciousness can only exist through continual recognition of the unconscious” (§178). Jung (1955/1963) extrapolated the 15th-century concept of coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) to describe the psyche as comprised of conscious and unconscious opposites, the integration of which constitutes a harmonious whole: “As a totality, the self is a coincidentia oppositorum; it is therefore bright and dark and yet neither” (§129n). As I read it, the psyche is “bright and dark” like the ancient Chinese concept of yin and yang. The etymology denotes the shady side (yin) and sunny side (yang) of a mountain, which alternate during the day. Likewise, the psyche consists of alternating dualities, and yet is neither (just as a mountain’s side is neither always sunny nor always shady). Dualities such as day and night, life and death, and (for Jung) the conscious and the unconscious, are interlocked in Heraclitan relationship that Jung (1943/1953) termed enantiodromia (literally, running in opposite ways) and elaborated as “the regulative function of opposites” (§111).

Unlike Heraclitan dualities, Kelly’s bipolar constructs could be merely descriptive contrasts, for example, “brown/blond hair” (each hair colour can exist independently of the other), though the contrast could be meaningful for someone. Specific constructs gain significance by virtue of their location within the whole of the “inside” structure, namely the personal constructs system. This system could become differentiated into conflicting subsystems, but its totality has the character of a singular “I” navigating “me” in the world. Contrastingly, Jung described the complexes as each having a life of its own (so to speak)— “Complexes are in fact ‘splinter psyches’” (Jung, 1934/1961b, §204)—and thus posited a multiplicity of “I’s,” or positions of consciousness. Jung located the dynamics of the psyche in oscillations across complexes, as well as in their development over the life course. Kelly’s theory equates the dynamic with the organisation and elaboration of the personal constructs system over time.

Forms of motion

Kelly (1955/1991a) contested psychologies that regarded the person as an inert object requiring activation by drives, needs, or goals. Averring that “the person is not an object which is temporarily in a moving state but is [themselves] a form of motion,” he stated that, for PCP purposes, the term person indicates “the individual person rather than any part of the person, any group of persons, or any particular process manifested in the person’s behaviour” (p. 33). It could be opined that PCP does concern a particular process (construing) and that the entity in motion is a mental structure whose transformations are triggered by events challenging one’s habitual construing. Jung (1944/1968) likewise professed an interest in the whole person— “It is just this homo totus whom we seek” (§6)—and analytical psychology likewise concerns a mental structure and assumes that this structure is in motion from birth. Whereas Kelly’s person is motivated by anticipation of future experiences, Jung’s homo totus is motivated towards the end-goal of individuation. On one side, “Anticipation is both the push and pull of the psychology of personal constructs” (Kelly 1955/1991a, p. 34). On the other, the push-and-pull of analytical psychology could be said to be equilibration, the driving force of individuation.

In PCP, the “push-and-pull” is served by ordering processes that organise one’s construing. The organisation corollary states, “each person characteristically evolves, for [their] convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs” (Kelly 1955/1991a, p. 39). Within the constructs system there could be “many levels of ordinal relationships, with some constructs subsuming others and those, in turn, subsuming still others” (p. 40). Specific constructs and their organisation change over time. To embellish Kelly’s example of differentiating between persons A, B, and C by their sex, imagine a scenario where—after certain experiences that widen the person’s awareness of gender identities—A, B, and C are now construed as alike because all three identify themselves as male or female respectively, and are therefore different from individuals who declare themselves to be nonbinary. In this example, the “male/female” construct becomes subordinal to “binary/nonbinary” identity.

Structural change in a personal constructs system may follow confrontations with events that challenge one’s habitual construing and can range from the trivial to the profound, and from sudden to gradual changes. Anecdotally, in my childhood I hated olives and would not eat any. Then, when on holiday in Israel with my fiancé, a friendly stranger we met picnicking by the Dead Sea offered us olives. It would have been rude to refuse. Ever since, I have loved the taste of olives. That chance encounter changed my gastronomic construing, but the construct “food I like/don’t like” is trivial for me. It could be important for someone else. Core constructs are those central to one’s sense of identity. On the other end of the spectrum are life-changing situations, both positive (e.g., the welcome birth of one’s first child) and negative, such as bereavement or extreme threat. Serbian constructivist psychologist Stojnov reflected on the war in the former Yugoslavia:

All that remains is an ever-growing awareness that my neat little construct system, so carefully nurtured for the past 30 years, does such a poor job in the anticipation business that I must consider replacing it with a brand new one. (Stojnov, 1996, as cited in Winter & Reed, 2021, p. 256)

Winter and Reed quote the above apropos psychological implications of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mental health issues might reflect a rigidity of the personal constructs system.

As a constructs system becomes more differentiated, it acquires the verticality of hierarchically organised constructs, like a tree data structure. This contrasts with the verticality of depth portrayed in the Freudian iceberg and Jung’s historically layered house. According to the experience corollary, “a person’s construction system varies as [they] successively construe the replications of events” (Kelly, 1955/1991a, p. 50). According to the fragmentation corollary, “a person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other” (p. 58). Both corollaries suggest that a sequence of events “continually subjects a person’s construction system to a validation process. The constructions one places upon events are working hypotheses, which are about to be put to the test of experience” (p. 51). This conjures scenarios such as persons who used to see the world through rose-tinted glasses coming to construe things pessimistically after many disappointments; or persons replacing rigid constructs systems with more adaptive ones thanks to therapy.

The assumption of developmental change is central also for analytical psychology (therapy would be pointless otherwise), but in addition, Jung postulated a kind of “synchronous” movement across complexes, which has no obvious equivalent in PCP. Conceptualising the psyche as seeking “the equilibration of all kinds of opposites,” he proposed that:

psychic processes therefore behave like a scale along which consciousness “slides”. At one moment it finds itself in the vicinity of instinct, and falls under its influence; at another, it slides along to the other end where spirit predominates. (Jung, 1954/1961d, §407–408)

Sliding between states (or alternate coexisting centres of awareness) could be likened to walking from a front room to a back room, and consequently having different views of the outdoors; we can return to look outside from the front.

Alternate centres of awareness are not explicitly theorised in PCP. Nevertheless, positing “self” as a construct allows for the likelihood that some me/not-me boundaries might involve conflicting constructions insofar as desired characteristics are associated with undesired characteristics. Contemporary PCP practitioners apply the term implicative dilemmas. For example, Fernandes (2007) reported the case of a 29-year-old student, “John,” who lived with his parents and had never worked. A repertory grid procedure elicited, inter alia, the construct “creates his own world/lives from day to day.” John rated himself as creating his own world and wished to live from day to day like his peers, but he also considered people who lived from day to day as “‘led by others,’ ‘don’t enjoy life,’ are ‘bad people,’ ‘subversive,’ and ‘don’t know what they want’” (p. 169). His ideal self thus conflicted with the undesired poles of his other constructs (an implicative dilemma). John’s posttherapy construing is not reported, but evidently it has changed: “Interestingly, now John accepts and likes to ‘create his own world’ more than before therapy, which suggests that the meaning linked to the construct ‘creates his own world/lives from day to day’ became more differentiated” (p. 179). Plausibly, “creates his own world” has branched into subordinal constructs that overlapped some constructs subsumed by “lives from day to day.”

Reinterpreted through a Jungian lens (for the sake of making a theoretical point), John’s implicative dilemma reflected a conscious thesis (his belief that creating his own world and living from day to day are mutually exclusive) that likely had its antithesis in something unconscious, which therefore could not be articulated by him at the time. Speculatively, a Jungian analyst treating John would be attentive to dreams that may express his unconscious position at the time. Jung likened this epistemic process to a dialogue between the unconscious and conscious mind:

the shuttling to and fro of arguments and affects represents the transcendent function of opposites. The confrontation of the two positions generates a tension . . . and creates a living, third thing . . . a movement out of the suspension between opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being, a new situation. (Jung, 1957/1961a, §189)

In the aforementioned headmaster case, if the man were to listen to the “argument” put forward by his unconscious through dreams of catastrophic ascent, this dialogue could have facilitated a new perspective from which to evaluate his career options; “The tendencies of the conscious and the unconscious are the two factors that together make up the transcendent function. It is called ‘transcendent’ because it makes the transition from one attitude to another organically possible” (Jung, 1957/1961a, §145).

Needless to say, the unconscious is the quintessential concept of analytical psychology. It differs from the Freudian conception insofar as Jung saw the unconscious positively as the source of creativity and growth. On the PCP side, Kelly rejected notions of an unconscious mind. He asserted the existence of preverbal constructs, which are “communicable by means other than words, and including personal constructs which are only partly immobilized because of their poor symbolization” (Kelly, 1955/1991a, p. 344), and further defended his standpoint by reference to clinical practice. If a client’s construing differs from the therapist’s, PCP therapists (unlike psychoanalysts) “assume that [they] construe them in some other way, not that [they] really must construe them the way we do but [are] unaware of it”; and if later the client agrees with the therapist, “that is a new construction for [them], not a revelation of a subconscious construction” (p. 345). His argument implies two kinds of movement: the transformation of existing constructs from preverbal to verbal (though the process whereby this is achieved is unclear); and the emergence of new constructions (e.g., through experiences within therapy sessions).

On his part, Jung theorised processes whereby something ill-understood or inarticulable becomes visible in dreams, fantasies, and more, and consequently articulable. He urged clinicians to regard dreams as diagnostically valid facts, stating that dreams are often anticipatory and provide valuable information for understanding the patient and planning a treatment (Jung, 1933/1966). Yet, to echo Kelly’s criticism of psychoanalysts, patients’ agreement with Jungian interpretations might be taken to be a revelation of unconscious contents. Analysing one of Jung’s case studies, Jones (2020) contended that Jung’s description of his patient’s progress understates the extent to which her “inner” dialogue was coconstructed by both of them (with Jung in the lead).

The dual carriageway to and from the social

In Britain, a dual carriageway is a road with a strip dividing traffic in opposite directions. Traditional personality studies drove from the psychological to the social: “When we examine the personality process . . . we are seeking not the cultural and social norms … but rather the revelation of just that peculiar, individual way of organizing experience and of feeling” (Frank, 1939, p. 392). Kelly’s theory encapsulates this position. Postmodern theorising drives in the opposite direction. In the wake of postmodernism (as a critical theory of knowledge), social constructionists described human subjectivities as epiphenomena of power relations, discursive practices, dialogical flows, and the open-ended use of language. In the spirit of postmodernity (a historically unique context of research and theorising), “softer” psychologies emerging in the 1980s performed a “move from the inside of the psyche to the text of the world” and from the “archaeology of the psyche to the architecture of cultural landscapes” (Kvale, 1992, as cited in Jones, 2007, p. 5). Jung’s theory can be readily described as an archaeology of the psyche.

For Jung, the significance of the social with regard to individuation lies in the extent to which unconscious elements are brought to consciousness through projection onto other people: “The shadow can be realized only through a relation to a partner, and anima and animus only through a relation to a partner of the opposite sex” (Jung, 1951/1959b, §42). This depiction of others as mental mirrors differs from the sociological concept encapsulated in Cooley’s (1902) dictum, “Each to each a looking-glass / Reflects the other that doth pass” (p. 183). Whereas Cooley pointed to reciprocity among social agents, Jung’s statement implicitly posits the targets of one’s projections as if devoid of social agency of their own. Presumably (in a heterosexual marriage), if a wife projects her animus onto her husband, and he projects his anima onto her, these are simply parallel processes inside each person (though it could impact on the marital relationship). Consequently, a social process or the “dialogic dimension is not exactly absent in Jung’s writings but has a fugitive status” (Jones, 2007, p. 39). Despite regarding archetypes as “the ‘human quality’ of the human being, the specifically human form [their] activities take” (Jung, 1954/1959a, §152), his catalogue of archetypes lacks an archetype of intimacy, belonging, or communitas.

Kelly (1955/1991a) similarly understated the primacy of social relationships. The sociality corollary—“to the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, [they] may play a role in a social process involving the other person” (p. 66)—implies a co-ordination of viewpoints, not a coconstruction of meaning. Kelly gave the analogy of driving down a highway. We stake our lives on accurately predicting what other drivers will do. This results in an “orderly, extremely complex, and precise weaving of traffic” despite knowing very little about other drivers; to know them as persons, “we must stop traffic and get out to talk with them” (p. 67). Social constructionism, in contrast, invites the analogy of drivers building the road together. Kelly’s reference to a social process implies interpersonal influence through perspective-taking, but this could be unilateral. While one person may “play a role in a social process” involving another person through understanding the other’s way of seeing things, “the understanding need not be reciprocated. Thus the one person is playing a role in a social process, but the other is not playing a role in that social process” (p. 69). Indeed, if clinicians identify themselves too closely with their client’s way of seeing things, the clinician’s role “becomes impoverished and the social process or the productive outcome of the clinician–client relationship comes to a standstill” (p. 69).

The primacy of the individual for Kelly is evident also in his focus exclusively on what Procter and Winter (2020) call “monadic construing” (one individual construing another one). Procter and Winter delineate two more levels of interpersonal construing. To paraphrase their examples, seeing person A as friendly is monadic construing. Seeing that A and B agree with each other is dyadic construing. Seeing how A, B, and C interact is triadic construing. A and B could be seen as cruelly making fun of C, for instance, or as amicably joking with C; “this triadic episode cannot be broken down into a pattern involving less than three people” (Procter & Winter, 2020, p. 66). Whereas Kelly prompted therapists to elicit clients’ construal of significant others (monadic), Procter and Winter stress the importance of eliciting also clients’ construal of relationship units. For example (mine), someone construing herself as being like her father and unlike her mother does not have the same significance or implications as construing her relationship with one parent as different from the relationship with the other parent. Procter’s relationality corollary, which he developed since the 1970s, attests to advances in PCP. Nevertheless, it does not perform the postmodernist U-turn insofar as social relationships are not taken to be the primary source of selfhood.

When Kelly (1955/1991b) considered cultural influences and conventions, he seemed to regard those as interferences with clients’ own accounts. He urged therapists to look for themes in the social world surrounding the client, for it is “against these that [they] must somehow make [their] own story plots appear to be plausible” (p. 150), and to pay attention to the client’s language background and “other symbolisms: religious, nationalistic, architectural, institutional, proverbial, epigrammatic, and so on,” for these indicate how “a person is likely to construe [their] world when [they are] reduced to the use of literalisms” (p. 151). This should not be mistaken for endorsing the primacy of the social. Since the 1970s, some psychologists sought to reconcile PCP with social constructionism, and opinions are still polarised. Some view PCP and social constructionism as compatible (e.g., Pavlovic, 2011), others identify tensions between them (e.g., Warren, 2004) or contend that the full potential of PCP for social constructionism remains underexplored (Shotter, 2007). The persuasiveness of the argument depends partly on which variant of social constructionism is discussed.

Social constructionism ascended to its zenith by the mid-1990s and then waned. A “turn” to affect has recently swept academia:

now many in cultural studies are turning away from language as a key to the meaning of human cultural interchange and focusing on affect instead … the intensity of experience rather than its quality or its discursive meaning . . . non-representational and non-conscious, therefore escaping all attempts to articulate it. (Burkitt, 2014, p. 11)

Jung was arguably making a similar point a century ago. He took it further by theorising processes of symbol-forming that led from the intensity of experience to its articulable meaning. The assertion of affect is central to his definition of complexes as constellations of “feeling-toned ideas” (quoted earlier). On the PCP side, Kelly did not theorise emotion or affect as a generic concept. As a clinician, he could hardly ignore emotional experiences, but defined specific emotions as subordinate to personal construing: “The diagnostic constructs of threat, fear, anxiety, and guilt are all essentially . . . to do with the transitions in one’s construction system” (Kelly, 1955/1991a, p. 374). For instance, threat is “the awareness of an imminent comprehensive change in one’s core structures” and fear is “the awareness of an imminent incidental change in one’s core structures” (p. 391). In this vein, hostility is “the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favour of a type of social prediction which has already been recognized as a failure” (p. 391).

Hostility may manifest in extremist ideologies and violence. Illustrating their PCP-based thesis with studies of radicalised Salafist Muslim youth in Tunisia and the writings of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, Winter and Feixas (2019) proposed that radicalisation occurs when a major invalidation of the person’s construing is followed with exposure to a worldview that provides a structure and certainty, thus inducing an identity change that is validated through interactions with like-minded people or by extorting evidence confirming the radical constructions. As Winter and Feixas note, radical constructions often involve extreme negative views of another group and may become further defined by taking extreme action against that group. Demonising the “other” also characterises racial prejudice. Brewster (2019), an African American Jungian analyst, gives a personal account of growing up as a Black child in the USA. She draws upon Jung’s address to (White) Americans, “Just as the coloured man lives in your cities and even within your houses, so also he lives under your skin, subconsciously. Naturally it works both ways. . . . every Negro has a white complex and every American a Negro complex” (Jung 1930, as cited in Brewster, 2019, p. 168). Her concept of a racial complex builds upon on the archetypal duality of ego and shadow, and its manifestations in the cultural unconscious (a post-Jungian concept denoting a “layer” between the personal and collective unconscious): “our racial complex hides behind shadow, surrounds it, and in the case of racial prejudice gives it expression” (p. 167).

Neither Brewster nor Winter and Feixas perform the postmodern turn to theorising the primacy of the social. They extend directions embarked upon by Jung and by Kelly into investigations of present-day social realities. Jung and Kelly were already dead when postmodernism gained ascendency and in historical retrospect they might fall foul of the postmodern paradigm in psychology. Nevertheless, for their followers at least, their legacies shed light on current concerns. In a way, this represents a movement from social and societal domains to the domain of psychological theory and research.

Conclusion

Like the alternating sunny and shady sides of a mountain, neither Jung’s theory nor Kelly’s is entirely true/false or always useful/useless. When Jung is in the light of our attention, we see theorising about how meaning finds us in our dreams, fantasies, projections, and emotional reactions; but an exposition of reality-oriented construing is relegated to the shady side. When Kelly is in the light, we see processes of meaning-making whereby persons interpret and anticipate their realities; but the subject matter of analytical psychology is obscured. From a postmodern (or sociological) standpoint, both theorists understated the primacy of the social. Yet, against the backdrop of shifting intellectual trends and social realities in flux, their legacies retain their appeal in some circles. The endurance of analytical psychology and PCP could reflect the extent to which they inform clinical practices. It could reflect also the extent to which their founders’ claims resonate with their followers, whose own reconsiderations and reformulations revitalise these perspectives with contemporary sensitivities and preoccupations. Focusing on the theme of “opposites,” this article has barely tapped the richness and sophistication of Jung’s and Kelly’s works.