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Constructivist Chronicle
An Interview with Larry Leitner
By Lara Honos-Webb
Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Winter 1998)
Go to photo
/ 2008 Update: Leitner Wins
Kelly Award Larry Leitner is a professor at Miami
University in Oxford, Ohio. He is a teacher, a therapist, a clinical
supervisor, a researcher and a writer. Much of his writing and thinking
has centered on elaborating what he has come to call Experiential
Personal Construct Therapy. Larry earned his Ph.D. in both clinical and
personality psychology at the University of Nebraska where Al Lanfield
served as his mentor. During his undergraduate matriculation at the
University of Florida, Larry worked with Franz Epting. In some respects,
the experiential focus of Larry's work is a response to the "too
cognitive" criticism of Personal Construct approaches. Experiential
Personal Construct Therapy (EPCT) emphasizes the importance of the ROLE
relationship between the therapist and client. The ROLE relationship is
derived from Kelly's sociality corollary. Larry has written about the
importance of the therapeutic relationship in his recent papers, "The
awful, aweful nature of ROLE relationships" (Leitner & Faidley, 1995)
and "Optimal therapeutic distance: A therapist's experience of personal
construct psychotherapy" (1995). EPCT also highlights the role that
intense emotions play in psychopathology. Larry has written about
intense emotional experiencing in psychotherapy in his earlier paper,
"Terror, risk and reverence: Experiential personal construct
psychotherapy" (1987). What follows are excerpts from my interviews
with Larry:
LHW: What is the essence of EPCT and
how does it differ from other approaches?
LL: I think the essence involves
acknowledging the human struggle—trying to connect to the process of
another human being while being terrified.
LHW: The client being terrified?
LL: Well, yes the client is terrified,
but not just the client, the therapist is terrified too. Think about
your own experiences in therapy. If you buy this approach, you're making
a big statement about your beliefs that a human relationship can be
transforming to people. If you enter into a therapy relationship and
that doesn't happen, either "A" it invalidates that very core belief or
"B" you have to say something about how you as a human being didn't have
what it takes to help this person. I think the therapist is as
frightened in many ways as is the client. I think that's particularly
true with less experienced therapists and more seriously disturbed
clients. I'm continually impressed with how frightened student
therapists are of severe, serious pain. When they feel that frightened,
they withdraw and therapy stops. So I think both people in the therapy
room are very frightened. I think implicit in that is respecting the
lived experience of the person. A third part is taking responsibility
for understanding human beings in ways that help them - what Kelly
called transitive diagnosis - and I've elaborated about dispositional
assessment. If I understand you in a way that keeps you stuck that's my
problem, I have a responsibility. How that differs from other forms of
therapy? I think it differs drastically from the current
cognitive-behavioral, biological approaches to "treating" people. I
don't see them as acknowledging the human to human struggle that's
implicit in the therapy relationship. I also think its different from
the psychoanalytic approaches, although I'm often accused of being an
object relations theorist. Even though the analysts often do
interesting writing about the therapy relationship, when you actually
see them practice they stay so damn neutral that its not very human to
me.
LHW: I imagine that part of the
impetus for constructing your own approach to therapy results in part
with a dissatisfaction with what has come before. Can you speak to that?
LL: . . . I think there was—there is—a
dissatisfaction with a lot of the theories of therapy out there. Going
to our case conferences for example (each week students present a case
to the faculty and other practicum students), is very painful for me.
Clients are so disrespected by clinicians. My sense was that most of
the theories out there were hostile, not just in the sense of
disrespecting clients but in the sense of having a view and imposing it
on the client without allowing the client's experience to speak to and
inform the therapist's view. I find all the behavioral and all of the
cognitive theories to be very limiting. There's nothing in those
theories that I can find that speaks to me in any way that's convincing
about human passions, human desires, things like that. The theories
that speak most to me outside of personal construct theory would be
existential and some, ood analytic theories." . . . .It's hard for
existential theories to generate good empirical work, and I think that
is a part of what a good theory should do. Most of the analytic
theories get very realistic in their philosophical assumptions and that
bothers me and there is a way in which they can be hostile. If your
experience disagrees with their conceptualization, its your resistance,
and your defensiveness - that bothers me also. I found construct
psychology as it was 20 years ago to have the potential to speak to
those things. It was always a source of frustration to me that I would
think I was doing what I thought of as good construct psychotherapy and
people would call me a psychoanalyst or an existentialist or something
like that. They couldn't see any connection between what I was doing and
construct psychology as it existed at that time.
So that became part of the impetus to develop construct psychology, I
view it as elaborating downward, sort of saying here are some of the
specific implications of the position.
LHW: . . . . I wonder if you're
speaking to the criticism that its too cognitive and that you elaborated
the Personal Construct approach to address that criticism?
LL: I think its very hard to read the
'55 volumes and really get a feel for the human heart. I think
elaborating experiential passion implications of the theory, I probably
have made some contribution there. I still view that -here's the
elegant theoretical superstructure of the theory- and I elaborated it
down into some subordinate implications of that superstructure.
LHW: . . . Is there any way in which
what you have to say challenges the Personal Construct Approach?
LL: . . . I think the main possible
challenge that comes to mind is, I think Kelly's view of optimal
functioning is, at the experiential level, a bit more relativistic than
mine. I think consistent with constructive alternativism, Kelly would
probably view people as being "healthy" psychologically without any of
the role relationships that I talk about. [He might believe] that people
could set up the world that way [without ROLE relationships], choose to
live that way and that would be okay. So I don't think I'm quite as
relativistic as that. I think within the framework of needing those
types of relationships there are innumerable ways of getting them and
struggling with them, but I do think there is a way in which they are
needed if a person is to grow. I think that's the biggest challenge
that I see. I don't think he [Kelly] would view the stuff that I've
written on resistance or levels of awareness to be a challenge, I think
he might view them as elaborations of some of his positions. I'm aware
that like the analytic schools, there's all sorts of different people
saying very different things and they all refer back to what Freud was
really saying. Maybe those of us in the third generation of construct
psychology all refer back [to Kelly] trying to say "Kelly was really
saying what we're saying", and we're winding up saying very different
things also. I think I'm less relativistic about what the good life is
than he is.
LHW: I wanted to come back to your
mention of the role of passion, desire and the human heart. One thing
I've taken from your approach is that a lot of what gets called
psychopathology actually has to do with human pain, hurt and suffering.
So what you said about human passion and desire, I'm familiar with, but
I wondered if you think it plays a role in psychopathology, separate
from pain and hurt?
LL: Its hard to know whether its
separate from pain and hurt. I talk about how you go to the dentist to
get a tooth filled or something, the dentist will give you Novocain to
take away the pain, Right? You say "right", and I say "No." Novocain
takes away all feeling, it doesn't just take away pain. You don't stop
pain without stopping all feelings. I think sometimes what happens is
that if the pains, injuries, devastations, wounds are too much, we numb
ourselves, but whenwe do that we stop ourselves from feeling other ways
also. I also think, and this is why its a complicated question, there
are times when those more "positive" feelings are just as threatening.
Paul Simon has a great song, and some day I keep threatening to write a
paper about how Paul Simon has already said everything on ROLE
relationships I've ever said. The title of the song is "Your Kind."
It's talking about "you're kind, you're kind, you looked after me when I
was blind, you've done all of these things for me" and finally he says,
"and why you don't treat me the way other humans do, is a mystery to me,
I must confess it makes me agitated to think you're going to love me now
indefinitely, so good-bye, good-bye, I'll leave you now, here's the
reason why - I like to sleep with the window open, and you keep the
window closed, so good-bye, good-bye, good-bye." And I know part of what
has fueled a lot of what I've written has been a desire to make sense of
my own experience. I think probably every personality theorist, maybe
every psychotherapist is really trying to do that. Understanding the
ways in which more positive affirmations, validations can be terrifying
has been an important part of the some of the stuff I've written. It
has helped me understand many of the more severely disturbed clients
I've worked with where the affirmation is often viewed as much more
threatening than the invalidation. Art Bohart (A friend of Larry's who
is a professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills) and I
argue about this from time to time. He argues that I'm wrong, that if
you open yourself up to the love its wonderful, its just the pain that
comes later - that if you don't open yourself up to the love you don't
get the pain that comes later. I would say anything people write about
as applying to people, the only thing you can be sure of, is that it
applies to themselves. I think a lot of the stuff that I write about is
stuff that I've lived, and I hope that's what makes it feel relevant -
than its not a sterile academic intellectual exercise. . . .
LHW: Who are the people who have
influenced your approach?
LL: . . . Part of what's been such an
impetus has been understanding a bit about my own hypocrisy as a human
being, when I would look at the courage with which my clients would face
such terrible things. Being a Kellian, reflexivity is a very important
part of how I approach things. To ask my clients to do things I wouldn't
do seemed to be very hypocritical. That made me feel like I had to have
the courage to write what I believed if I was asking these people to
have the courage to live what they believed.
LHW: . . . It's not just the scholars,
the supervisors, the colleagues, but it sounds like what you're saying
is that the clients in their courage inspired you.
LL: To truly listen to a client, many
of the clients that I work with are trying to live with things that look
unlivable. To truly listen to that struggle is, it changes a person I
hope. I hope it changed me.
LHW: So just being in the presence of
people changing has also been transformative for you.
LL: I think the last thing I'd say
about that involves various and sundry student-type persons. I think in
some ways, the graduate students I have worked with have forced me
sometimes to grow, and explain and elaborate things because it wasn't
said clearly in a way a student could understand it, and use it in
powerful ways. They would force me to think through ways I could say it
- a principle, a point, an issue - so that's been very important. Once
again, I had to be with them less of a hypocrite, how can they go
upstairs and present a case conference where they say "this is where I
stand" if I'm unwilling to do it? I think other people who have
challenged and forced me in the constructivist camp would be people like
Peter Cummins and Sally Robbins and especially Gavin Dunnett.
LHW: According to your approach to
what degree are therapists affected by their clients?
LL: I think a good therapist has to be
profoundly affected by their clients. Optimal therapeutic distance
implies that I can experience the client's experience. I think there's
something profoundly moving in a positive way, if your talking about a
horrific event in your life and you can see your therapist physically
moved by such horror. If your therapist can process the event in such a
way that he or she can work with you on it, what the analysts call
"metabolizing the event", it touches me it moves me and it affects me
and I can help you with it and process it. Much of who I am and where I
am in my life's path today has come about because of the way my client's
have affected me. It would be hard for me to live a life where I asked
my clients to have more courage than I could have. If I 'm going to ask
such things of my clients, I better be ready to have the courage to live
a life where I take the same sorts of risks, there are many things in my
life that changed because my clients have had the courage to do things
that I needed to do too.
LHW: Have you ever had the experience
of a client bringing issues to you that you've been astonished at the
parallels to your own life? You wrote about one case in which a man
struggled with balancing his family life with his work and your
identification with those same issues. Do you think that the one case
you've written about was an exception?
LL: No, (laugh) I think probably that
was the most innocuous example I could find, that's probably why I use
it. One of the things I tell people, always pay attention to the issues
your clients bring in. If you get more than one or two clients in a day
bring in an issue, something in you is pulling that. Oh yeah, much more
deeply rooted emotionally conflictual than balancing work and home.
How's that for enticing without getting into specifics?
LHW: Well, this isn't a Kitty
Kelly-like tell all. But I'm also interested in, it sounds very
mysterious, do you have any sense of how, why, or the mechanism for that
phenomenon?
LL: Yeah, I have a sense of that. I
think that what happens is that if an issue, I'm thinking of an issue
I've struggled with in the last three of four years and still struggle
with at a profound deep level and am quite resistant to admitting there
is any other way of construing it other than the primitive ways I did
way back then and all of that. I think 8, 9, 10 years ago it never came
up in therapy, probably because I was so threatened by this issue that I
wouldn't recognize it, so that there could be things that could get to
it, I didn't see them. As you get more ready to struggle with an issue,
then you have more of your own psychological processes attuned to that
issue, and then you're more likely to see it. Maybe as you get further
along in that and it feels more settled, then you don't see it quite as
much as you used to, so I think that's a big part of the process of it.
I think its one of the ways too, that clients test whether you are a
hypocrite. Do you have the courage to face your own issues? And if you
don't they're not going to bring them up.
LHW: What advise do you have for an
aspiring academic?
LL: This battle for the soul of
psychology can only be won by the "good guys" if we write from what we
feel, about what we feel is most important and that gets to writing with
passion, emotional thought. In most of the traditional stuff there
isn't any emotion in it. Passionate interchanges in therapy get coded
as utterances or something, there's no emotion in that, it's viewed as
bad.
Dr. Larry Leitner
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