An Interview with Psychologist Spencer McWilliams
Spencer McWilliams, Ph.D. is a a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at California State University San Marcos. He specializes in Constructivist approaches to personality and self, Personal Construct Psychology and Buddhist psychology.
Sara Wilson: Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us today for this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview series. My name is Sara Wilson and I'm a research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. We're a Seattle-based psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy practice specializing in anxiety disorders.
Today I'd like to welcome with us psychologist Spencer A. McWilliams. Dr. McWilliams is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at California State University San Marcos and served as the former President of the North American Constructivist Psychology Network. He earned his PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Rochester in 1971 and his interests include constructivist approaches to personality and self, personal construct psychology, and Buddhist psychology. So before we get started today, could you please let us know a little bit more about yourself and, ironically, what made you interested in studying the self as it relates to psychological dysfunction?
Spencer A. McWilliams: Well, thank you. I've thought a lot about this since you invited me for the interview. I guess one of my early life experiences was kind of feeling like I didn't quite understand social interactions and stuff, why people said the things they did and why people said things they didn't mean and things they didn't say and stuff like that. So I always felt there was an interest in me to try to figure out what to make of this life that I have on this plane.
So when I went off to college, I decided just to be a liberal arts major my first couple of years. I couldn't decide what I wanted to major in, actually I was thinking about being an engineer and then suddenly I discovered that I didn't really care that much for math and science, and so I took a lot of different courses and when it came time for my junior year, I had to pick a major. So I chose psychology – I was interested in literature, in art, in psychology. I figured if I majored in literature or art, I probably wouldn't be able to get a job, but if I majored in psychology, maybe I could. And I had some experiences that kind of got me interested in clinical psychology.
I had the opportunity to work as an assistant to a psychologist in the Juvenile Hall during my junior year, and that kind of got me pointed towards clinical psychology. And so I went off and got into graduate school and, as you said, got my PhD in clinical psychology with an emphasis in community psychology at that time. So I was fortunate to get a good job at the University of Arizona right after graduate school. And I started out there trying to continue the work in community psychology that I had done with my mentor in graduate school. But I found over time that it wasn't very satisfying to me because I wanted to have a clearer sense of what a person is, what a human being is, and community psychologists were doing all these wonderful things out there in the community, helping people, but it didn't quite fit for me.
And then I got a chance to teach psychology of personality as my undergraduate course, and I had taken that class at Cal State Long Beach where I got my Bachelor's, and I really liked the way the instructor had done it. He'd chosen individual books for each individual theory, and so I decided I was going to do that. And I was at an APA Convention looking at various books, and I saw that there was this book by George Kelly called “A Theory of Personality”, which I learned is the first three chapters of this major work. And I had remembered that one of my profs in graduate school had told us a story about Kelly, about how he had applied his own theory to some problems that he was having to deal with himself. And I thought, well, that really appealed to me, the idea that if we're going to have a theory personality, it ought to be able to explain what we do rather than just say that it's for other people.
So I decided to have his book, along with a book on psychoanalysis and a book on behaviorism and a book on Carl Rogers. And so I hadn't read anything about the guy. So I actually was about two weeks ahead of my class reading that book, and it was like an epiphany. It was like suddenly I said, "Oh, this is my tribe. I've finally come home to people who look at the world the way I do." So I got to reading everything I could find about Kelly and his work and found out that at that time, most of the work in the field was going on in England and I had a sabbatical coming up, and various colleagues I got in touch with, some people in England, seeing if I could come and study with them in my sabbatical. And I heard from everybody, but one of them, a woman named Fay Fransella, who was really one of the key players in personal construct psychology in the UK at that time. And she invited me to come and spend a year with her at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine where she was a faculty member.
And I got to hang out with all kinds of different people who were interested in Kelly's work. And then when I came back to Arizona and said, "Okay, what am I going to do next?" So I continued working on Kelly's work, and I'll describe his work more fully when we talk about constructivism, and then I got interested in, this is on my personal path, interested in Buddhism and started working with a teacher at the Zen Center of Los Angeles, a woman named Charlotte Joko Beck, who had just started teaching, well she was in her 60s at that time, and I became one of her students and studied with her for about 30 years until her death about 10 years ago.
And I continued to practice what she taught and continued to read her work. And so that's a major part of my journey in life. So the question about self, it comes up in different ways in each of these various places. The constructivists are going to say that the self is an inventive construct that we made up. And the Buddhists, of course, are going to say that there really is no such thing as a self, it's just an illusion that we have. So that kind of gives you an overview of the kind of things that I've studied over the course of my career and even since my retirement.
Sara Wilson: Great. This is really, really cool. So getting right into it, in your paper, “Inherent Self, Invented Self, Empty Self: Constructivism, Buddhism, and Psychotherapy”, you outlined many of the valuable aspects of constructivist psychotherapy over foundationalist psychotherapy, drawing on, as you said, Buddhist outlooks on the human condition. So first and foremost, you mentioned this term constructivism and constructivist practice. Could you explain to our audience what constructivism is?
Spencer A. McWilliams: Well, sure. I'm happy to do so, but I want to have the caveat that this is just my construction, my understanding of it. This is not the truth or the final word on it. So, one of the things that struck me about George Kelly's work when I started reading it is he said that, his basic philosophical assumption underlined here is that all of our present interpretations and understandings of the world are subject to revision and replacement. So I'm getting goosebumps just saying that, what it's really saying is that we humans are creating or constructing our understanding of our experience in the world. And we try to make sense of it, but there's no external source of what we should do.
Basically, the constructivists would say that, well, some of them would say that constructivism is about how we find meaning to life and others of us would say that constructivism is all there is in making sense of life. That we humans are basically dealing with the world, seeing things that are familiar and unfamiliar, things that we recognize and don't recognize. And out of that, we begin to develop these bipolar dimensions and things like hot versus cold and up versus down, and very, very hot these days versus much cooler. And that while we learn from our community, obviously we learn languages and words and how to apply words to these dimensions that we come up with, that the dimensions are just bipolar dimensions that we use to make sense out of what it is that we see.
Now, we give words to those dimensions and we give words to the things that fit along those dimensions, and this is getting more into the Buddhist perspective, but the words that we develop lead us, and the fact that we separate things that we recognize and don't recognize leads us into the idea that individual things exist, individual things that we give names to. But what we begin to see from the constructor's perspective is that those are our personal dimensions. Those are our personal ways of making meaning out of life. And one of the constructs in person construct psychology is the notion of poor constructs, that we develop some sense of who it is that we are in relation to our experience that we have in the world, and most of the constructors would say it has to do with our experience of the world, not with the environment, because there really is no fixed environment. It's our experience and how we make sense of it.
Sara Wilson: Just, if I'm understanding you correctly, there are at least two branches of constructivism. So one of which boils down to how we make sense of our world and that is all we are in touch with, regardless of whether there is an external world or any truth to the external world. And then there's maybe the Buddhist outlook on constructivism, which asserts that that is all there is; just our meanings which aren't conversant about any external world or ultimate truth.
Spencer A. McWilliams: Yes, I wouldn't refer to Buddhism as a branch of constructivism. I think the fact that I have... I learned about constructivism then I learned about Buddhism, and initially it was a problem because I thought, well, these are really incompatible, but as I learned more, I found, well, no, they are compatible, but they're different. I think the difference is that, I'm talking about from a therapeutic or counseling perspective, that the constructivist perspective basically helps people to make sense out of the way they look at the world and helps them to see how the ways they're looking at the world may not be effective in having them be able to meet their needs and what they want in life.
The Buddhist perspective is focused on the same kind of issue of dissatisfaction in life, why life is so dissatisfying, but rather than trying to figure out how to make your sense of the world work better, the Buddhist perspective is then to say, "Well, what's important is forgetting your perspective on the world and what you're trying to make sense of it. Just be with what's going on in the moment, because all those words and all those concepts and ideas take me away from this experiencing life as it is."
Sara Wilson: Yeah, for sure. And now just kind of bringing this into a therapeutic context, how does constructivism differ from this term or this practice, foundationalism? And what are the potential dangers of a foundationalist view of self in the context of mental health?
Spencer A. McWilliams: Okay. Well, let me talk a little bit about foundationalism. It's actually pretty much the way that most people look at the world. It has evolved out of the Christian frame of mind and science, but the foundationalism, other names for it are realist for example, is the view that there is, in addition to our being in the world and our way of looking at the world, there is something external to us that we think of as the way that the world is. Okay? So if we're trying to learn about how to make sense out of life and what's going on and the foundationalist view would be to say, there is a specific way and that any knowledge, in order to be true or valuable, has to correspond to the way the world actually is independently.
Okay? Well there's a big problem with that because we would have no way of knowing. There's no way that we could figure out. One of my favorite early Greek sophist philosophers, Gorgias, talked about this. And basically he said that the problem is that, in order for us to determine whether our view of the world is the correct view of the world, we would have to have a separate referee, separate from we humans who could look at our theory, our idea about things, look at the way the world really is, as if there was a way that it is, and be able to tell us whether that was correct.
Okay? Well that's a nice idea, but it doesn't exist. It's impossible. So there's no way we can really know how the way world is or the world or the universe and whatever we want to call it is on its own independently of us, because the only way we can come to know it is through our trying to make sense using our constructs that we invent to make meaning out of the experiences that we have and trying to continue to improve our knowledge and understanding so it seems to make more sense for us, but even though sciences, we talk about discoveries as if Einstein was walking along the path one day and kicked a rock, rolled over and up jumped this thing that said, "Hi, I'm the theory of relativity," and he discovered it. Well, he didn't discover it, he invented it. He used his own intelligence to make sense out of physics and that's what he came up with.
So, there's a big debate that goes on and there's a kind of little war between the foundationalists and the constructivists in some of the literature because the constructivists want to believe that there is a truth and a reality that we're dealing with and that there is an exact way that things are. And when the constructivists say, "Well no, there are a variety of alternative ways of making sense of the world and none of them are the absolute truth," foundationalists get kind of anxious about that. That makes them a little bit worried because they want to know the truth. And this is a perspective that most people have, that there's something that is the truth out there, whether it's a scientific truth or whether it's a religious truth or whatever else, that there is a truth and that we want to know what that is.
So the difference between the foundationalist view and the constructivist view is that the foundationalist view is saying that there is something real, that there is something called the self that is something real we possess. I don't know who it is that possesses it in there, but that's the idea that we have, we have a personality that psychological problems can be categorized into the diagnostic and statistic manual, we can attach these diagnoses and things to people when they're having troubles with their lives. The constructivists would say, "No, we're looking at people as individuals. We want to know how they look at the world, what's going on in their life, and how we can help them to make better sense of it." So those are some differences then.
Sara Wilson: Yeah, I think you put that really well. And it does really come down to reconstructing this narrative around agency, because on the foundationalist account, psychological wellbeing consists of, as you said, adjustment and adaptation to this so-called fixed reality of self and environment, as well as the absence of disorder. So in turn, not really leaving room for agency of self and ignoring this very real ability to create meaning for an organizing and understanding experience, as you mentioned.
Spencer A. McWilliams: Yeah. Makes a lot of sense that what most of us are looking for in terms of helping other people is that idea of helping people to be an agent in their lives and helping them to continue evolving, I think, is the way that I... But the foundationalist approach tends to want to stop at a certain point in evolution and say, "Well, this is it. Evolution's over and we're done and everything's fine now," but somehow life doesn't seem to want to go the way I want it to.
Sara Wilson: Right. So we already touched on this a little bit, but what is the value of constructivism in a therapeutic context? And could you maybe give an example of what this might look like in therapy?
Spencer A. McWilliams: Sure. The idea with constructivism is the same, that there's no truth out there, there's no external source of truth or absolute about how it is that we are supposed to behave or what we need to do, how we're supposed to be. A lot of the problems that people have is that they're trying to behave the way they think they're supposed to behave rather than the way that they would naturally behave. So the constructivists would, rather than trying to pin a label on a person and consider it a disorder and look for a specific cure of that disorder, would be helping the person come to understand themselves and how they make sense of things.
I'll give an example, when I was in England on my sabbatical, one of the things that my mentor, Fay Fransella, had done, she had done a lot of work on applying personal construct psychology therapy in stuttering, and stuttering is a big problem in the UK. In England, there's a lot of emphasis on being proper and saying things the right way. So a lot of people who have difficulty with that end up being stutterers, and so she assigned me a client who was a stutterer. And so getting to know him, he worked as an interior designer. He had trouble saying that. He worked for one of the brewing companies, so he designed pubs. So he always said he was a pub designer – he could say that easier.
And so one of the things that we did was to use a tool that George Kelly had developed and other people since then have really elaborated on a lot, where we ask the person to come up with names of people who have played different roles in their life, and you have maybe a list of maybe a dozen or 15 people, and so then bringing them together in groups of three. So say maybe this was your high school teacher and this was your father and this is your first girlfriend, and ask, what is a way in which two of these people are alike that make them different from the third? Okay? So they're having to come up with, on their own, there's not some truth about it. I mean you can't use, "Well, these two are female and this one's male," yeah, but what about their personality, what they're like? And out of that, you begin to develop a network and a hierarchically organized network of what this person sees as the way other people in their life are like and how they see themselves, because the self is also one of the elements that they would use.
And one of the things I found in working with this fellow is that he had come from the north of England, now he was in London, which is sort of like coming from Arkansas and now being in New York. And of course he didn't speak the way the Londoners spoke. It was an accent that he had and that was part of the problem with his stuttering. But one of the important concepts for him about who he was is that it was important to him to be perfectly natural was the term he'd use, as opposed to the contrast to that being putting on airs. Okay? So he was really stuck because he wanted to be able to get along in London and be effectively good in his job, but he wanted to be perfectly natural. He didn't like to feel like he was putting on airs, but if he talked like they did, then for him that would be putting on airs. So we were to kind of separate those things out, seeing that it wouldn't necessarily have to be putting on airs for you to practice a different way, just a different role you can try on for the moment.
And so we worked out a description of a role that he could play where he would be perfectly natural but also fluent verbally, and it was like, okay, you're going to pretend to be this character we just made up for two weeks and then the character's going to go away and you're going to come back. So it isn't like you have to be this way, there's something wrong with the way you are, it's just wouldn't it be interesting to try to behave in a different way to see how it works out? And so that's another of Kelly's original methods. And of course, we've been elaborating on a whole lot more in the 50 years since Kelly did the work that he did. That's one example.
Sara Wilson: Yeah. I think that that is a very inspiring story for people who feel trapped in a certain kind of self and feel inclined towards attachment and fixation to a certain being. And I think that your practice very much emphasizes acceptance in a way and acknowledgement, but also really highlights this ability to make real change that starts with your thoughts. So you already touched on this a little bit also, but I think it's important to go back to this kind of foundation; what parallels can be drawn between constructivist approaches to psychological dysfunction and Buddhist outlooks on the human condition?
Spencer A. McWilliams: That's a really good question. Well, to go back to the classical constructivist view, kind of like Kelly, his definition of the psychological disorder is the continued use of a way of anticipating events in spite of their repeated invalidation. It sounds a lot like what Einstein said was the definition of craziness; continue to do the same thing over and over again and it didn't work.
So the constructivist would want to help the person to take a look at the way they're making sense of the world, find a way for them to be consistent with their most deeply held values, but maybe try out different experiments with their life. But I think even most of the constructivists, and this was a problem I got into when I got into Buddhism, dealing with my own issues there, is that issues we would sort of say that the self, in constructivism, is the constructs you use, the dimensions that you use to make sense of the world and make sense of yourself in relation to other people would be the kind of person that you are, what are your core values? So you don't want to try to encourage the person to behave in a way that's inconsistent with their core values, but you can see if you can find alternate ways that they can behave that are consistent with their core values, if they can give them a chance to try out something different.
Okay. Well the Buddhist perspective, basically their fundamental issue is that the Buddha was concerned with why is it that life seems so unsatisfactory for people? And how can people get out of feeling that life is unsatisfactory? The term that he used to refer to a dissatisfactory life is a term that is something like Dukkha, which literally means a bad fit between a wheel and an axle. Okay? So as you can sort of imagine though, if the wheel is wobbly on the axle, the cart's not going to go very well. If it's sticking and can't turn well, it's not going to go well. So the basic issue in Buddhism is, how can people get away from feeling that their life is not working well, that their life is a bad fit between their wheels and their axles?
So what he found as he worked on his own journey was that the problem we had is that when we go through life, there are certain things that happen that we like, and there are certain things that happen that we don't like. Now these things just happen. There's no purpose to any of it, it just goes on out there. So our liking or disliking it is our own issue, but we have this tendency to want to be attached to the things that we like. We get greedy for the things we like, we want them to stay with us and never go away. And we want to get away from the things that we don't like. And that, by doing this, we're living an illusion and thinking that the world is composed of good things and bad things. Okay?
Sara Wilson: Right.
Spencer A. McWilliams: And so what happens is that, again life never goes the way we want it to go. Again, the universe is on its own. The universe doesn't care about what we say about or the words we use. And so the whole approach then in Buddhism is for us to begin to come to understand these bipolar dimensions that the constructivists talk about, how it is that they end up running our life. And so we need to find a way of learning about those dimensions in a way that's going to sustain itself over a lifetime.
So the Buddhist practices, you start out with meditation where what you're doing is, well, first of all, what you're doing is trying to see if you can sit still for a while and not get caught up in all the stuff you think you have to do in order for everything to be okay. And that usually takes the first few years of a practitioner's life and just where you don't think every thought comes into your mind as something you got to do something about. And over time you begin to see what the patterns are in your thoughts, the thoughts that come in, and over time, if you sit with them long enough, you get bored with them and you begin to be more open to the immediate situation. And the openness to the immediate situation means being able to experience what's going on fully, just experience what it feels like and what you're seeing, rather than immediately making this judgment that this is good and I got to do more, this is bad and I got to get away from it, or something like that.
So in doing that, you kind of see through the illusion that there's a self, but one thing, who is it who's having all of these thoughts? And that's one of the things that people want to get. They say, "I want to find out what the self in there is like." Well, the problem is that every time you go looking for yourself, that's just more thoughts. So if you're looking for the thinker, you can never find the thinker, all you're finding is thoughts. And eventually you become aware that the notion that we're separate beings doesn't really make sense and it actually fits in nicely with what's going on currently on the cutting edge of sciences like physics and chemistry.
I've been recently looking at the great courses, which is a thing you get online to listen to lectures from people in these fields. And what we end up seeing is that, well first of all, everything is made out of the same stuff. And that same stuff really isn't anything, it's mostly just these vibrations that go around the nuclei of atoms. And I guess they see now they're getting down where they can see that the nuclei are made up of quirks and strangeness and stuff like that. But it's really no thing. And in this force in chemistry you see that all of the elements are made up of exactly the same kind of atoms and electrons, it's just some of them have more than the other ones. Okay?
So everything in the universe is really just all the same stuff. But when we get into labeling things, you see words, labeling things and saying, "Well, this is a tree and this is a rock," then we begin to develop the idea that our world is composed of individual things that have their own individual identity, their own selfhood. Okay? So we think that a rock is a rock and there's some characteristic that it has, it is inherently the rock-ness of it. I don't mean this particular example of a rock, and Aristotle was big on that, if you look up the word, there must be something that it refers to. Well, no, it's just our words. So what we're looking to do is to come to see that there is no separation, there is no separate self, there's no innate, inherent self in the human being any more than there's some innate, inherent thing that is tree-ness, the trees have in common, the rock-ness that rocks have in common. And so that's an unfolding way of looking at the world.
Sara Wilson: I think that this leads us really nicely into my next question because this line of thinking is absolutely applicable to knowledge as well. So in your discussion of epistemological understandings of self, you note how knowledge is evolving interdependently within social and personal contexts and it's passed in conventional rather than absolute language. And so we cannot assume that our knowledge about the self proves the existence of an objective self metaphysically. And so I was wondering if you could explain this distinction between epistemology and metaphysics to our audience and how this might inform therapeutic practice.
Spencer A. McWilliams: Well, okay, sure. One of the things that George Kelly said when I first started reading him way back was he said that when a person makes a statement about their experience of the world and proposes how they might understand it, there are two ways that we can look at that. One is we could say that, well, what they're saying is the way it really is out there in the world, independently of a person, or the other way is that this is just one person's hopeful way of trying to make some sense out of being out of their mind. So there are two really different ways, and they're reflecting the foundationalist view on the one hand that there's a truth out there and the constructive view that says, "We humans are responsible for making sense out of what we do." So a lot of the groundwork in constructivism is related to the philosophy of pragmatism. And the philosophy of pragmatism says that since we don't know how we would ever know whether our thoughts and ideas and theories and concepts are the truth, then the issue should be which one of these ideas is likely to work better for us in solving human problems? And we can think of that on a societal level saying, what is it that's going on in our lives that is a problem and how do we solve this particular problem? Now, if we come up with a solution to this particular problem, it doesn't mean that we've found the truth. It means that, well, this worked this time and it may not work the next time, and that we keep our minds open and recognize that it's all we human beings. There's nothing external to us that's going to help us out there.
So if we think epistemologically, what we're doing is we're each, as individuals and then as a society, because we grew up in a society and we learn a language and we learn how to, I mean a lot of learning language as children is learning the names we're supposed to give to things, that's a tree and that's a bird and this sort of thing. And then there's this solution that because we got the name for it, we understand something about it, which we don't necessarily, but that we're making sense out of things in that particular specific way. Whereas in the constructivist view, again, we're saying we don't know anything beyond what we experienced, but over the course of our lifetime, we come into contact with different people, our parents and the society we live in where, again, we learn various words for things, we learn various things that are good and various things that are bad, what are considered good morals and that sort of thing. And we come to have the sense that that's the way the world is, particularly most people grew up pretty close to where they were born, and they interact with the same people pretty much their whole lives. And so they begin to develop this idea as they develop their sense of kinship, or maybe even a tribal sense of belongingness with this group, that this group's way of looking at the world is the way that it is. And then when they come in contact with people who are different from them, there's a tendency, so our group is better, we're better than the other people, they're inferior to us. So that sense we have, a kind of belongingness through our tribal membership, it inevitably leads to ethnocentricity where we think that our group is doing things the right way. And so anyone who's not in our group is inferior, so we don't need to treat them in the same way we would treat our kinship.
And that creates a lot of the difficulties and problems, and I'm probably wandering away from the exact question you were asking, but you were asking about epistemology and metaphysics, how do we view the world that we live in? If we view the world that we live in as made up of different things, some of which are good, some of which are bad, of different people, some of whom are good and some of whom are bad, then we're constantly in struggle with the world around us. And all the things you read on the news are good examples of that.
Whereas, if we think of the world as a process rather than a thing, that it's a process where things continually change, things continually evolve, then we can see that things are more like events that occur in particular times and places and its way of dependent interaction with other events that are occurring. So things have their qualities and characteristics, but they're changing and they only have those characteristics because they're emerging out of other patterns and other flows of various events. So when you think of an event or even a person as an interaction of constantly evolving and changing processes that don't have any permanent nature to them, well, we'll see the world in a different way. We're not something separate. We're just part of those flowing processes ourselves.
Sara Wilson: Right. Yeah. All of this really reminded me of John Locke's theory of ideas. In my philosophy major, I engaged with him a little bit, and he's concerned with what we can know from this theory of ideas, and according to Locke, and I think the constructivists would agree, knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of our ideas.
Spencer A. McWilliams: Yeah.
Sara Wilson: And in this alone it consists. So, a system of epistemology and a system of understanding self, for example, relies on ideas alone, since it's all our mind really has access to. And so it's evident that our knowledge is only conversant about ideas. And I think this would scare a lot of people, and especially the foundationalists, but I think when you lean into constructivism and really take the time to understand it, it becomes evident that agency really becomes possible.
Spencer A. McWilliams: Yeah. Yeah. It's only in a place where there's no fixed truths is there room for us to grow and develop and evolve and solve our problems.
Sara Wilson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Now, in your paper, “The Sacred Way of Liberal Arts”, you employ this religious metaphor, idolatry, which arises from our failure to appreciate our knowledge as a human invention that can only represent reality but cannot be reality. What is the importance of epistemic humility and perhaps embracing obscurity and paradox when it comes to informing conceptions of self and contributing to happiness and wellbeing?
Spencer A. McWilliams: Well, as we've been saying, it's probably most useful to regard self as a social construct, a convention that society finds useful, reading something about it recently that was talking about how society creates this notion that you are something in there and then it holds that thing responsible for what it does. So it's kind of a little paradox. So, remind me what the question was here.
Sara Wilson: It was an elaboration on this term idolatry as it relates to a therapeutic context.
Spencer A. McWilliams: Okay. Yeah, yeah. So you're asking about what the benefit is to us of having this open-minded view about the world, that it gives us an opportunity to grow and develop and then gives us an opportunity to make changes. And it also gives us an opportunity to move beyond being stuck in the past, stuck in the past of our own experience growing up in life and the past of human beings. And there's, sorry, I had a quote I was going to mention, but it slipped my mind. That's what happens when you get to be my age, you have that to look forward to.
Sara Wilson: Yeah. Well, I mean we talked about this a good amount, but all of this certainly contributes to a rich philosophical discourse surrounding truth, so your papers “Truth as Trophy” and “Who Do You Think You Are?” inquire about the origins and validity of the term truth? Could you share your conclusions with our audience? And also how might reconceptualizing what truth means inform our approach to psychological dysfunction and our personal relationship to negative thoughts?
Spencer A. McWilliams: Well, first of all, I would make it clear that the word truth is a judgment. Truth or falsity is a judgment that human beings make of a statement that another human being made. Okay? So truth only has to do with sentences that we speak or sentences that we write. That is whether someone agrees with it or not, because again, there's no way to find that separate way of asking, this idea of true. So I think if you look at science, you see that science is an evolving process of people coming up with sentences and theories that they find useful in making sense out of their study of the field. And what happens is that if enough people begin to find that theory or that perspective useful, then pretty soon the society of scientists in that field are going to come along to adopt that theory as being the dominant theory.
So they will say that it's the truth. That's what the term in my paper, “Truth as Trophy”, that it's the award that we give to a theory or concept that someone has come up with that we can't find a way to refute, for now. Okay? But if you look at the history of science or history of human knowledge, eventually every theory has holes in it, and then you have a scientific revolution where somebody comes up with a new theory and people are going to live in that for a while. And that's the way that we humans can operate, just to keep evolving our ideas and our way of making sense out of things, but to not get stuck on the idea that because we've come up with something that everybody agrees upon, that now we've hit on a universal truth just about the world itself.
Sara Wilson: Now, how might a person integrate this line of thought within their personal relationship to their mind or to their self or who they think their self is or negative thoughts?
Spencer A. McWilliams: Well, I think first of all, it's useful to be open to the awareness that the self is something that evolves over time, over the course of a lifetime. The best book I like, my favorite book on that, is by a guy who was at Harvard College of Education, see if I can pull up his name. Robert Kegan, his book is called “The Evolving Self”, and he talks about how we can evolve our understanding of ourself in the world and we can get it to a point where it seems to be working for us, we know our way around town, we know our role in relation to other people, we know how to solve problems and things like that. So we're happy, we're content, and we're happy to stay in this perspective. And about half the population is basically in that perspective, it's, again, that sort of ethnocentric belongingness to their group kind of point of view. But we can evolve beyond that, if we can step back from the way that our experience has been in the world and begin to see that there are other ways that people live in the world, there are other possibilities. I know for me, one of the big experiences in my life was I grew up in a relatively small city in Northern Colorado. The high school sponsored a spring break educational tour, and I managed to talk my folks into letting me go on it and saving up enough money to do it. And we went to Chicago, we went to New York City, we went to Washington DC, we went to, what's it down in Virginia? It's amazing how many of these common words slip out of my memory, Williamsburg.
And when I went back to my hometown, it just didn't look the same. I mean I had met people who never even heard of my hometown. Who can imagine that? So I think when we have experiences where we get outside of our comfort zones and outside of where we have been all of our lives and interact with other people, we begin to see that there are more options and more possibilities, and we can use that to evolve our sense of self. And as somebody who has certain strengths and certain capabilities to be effective in the world. And then beyond that, eventually at some point really seeing the total relativity of all of the ways of being, ways of life that people have, and begin to see that there's not one that's better than the other, they're just different. And we can treat everybody in the world the same way we would treat our own family because we see that we are connected with them. Now, that's a hard place to get, and Kegan thinks that probably only a few people get to that, maybe 10% of the population gets to the point where they can see things in that way. And probably only past the age of 40 or so when we evolve that far, where we can continually evolve throughout our lives, the idea that there's not one way of doing things and the way that we grew up is the correct one.
Sara Wilson: Yeah. This is great. Now, throughout this interview, we've been leaning a lot into this notion of the dependency and the emptiness of self, but I did want to touch on the flip side of that. In your paper, “Inherent Self, Invented Self, Empty Self”, you do acknowledge that many psychotherapeutic approaches describe human development in terms of an identity at one stage, which evolves into an identity at the next stage. And so in such Buddhist approaches, which emphasize seeing through the illusion of an inherent self, require a prior development of an effective sense of self structure as some foundation. So keep this in mind, how should we view the self in a therapeutic context?
Spencer A. McWilliams: Well, I think, and I've come to this late in my career, I think that the developmental psychologists, they like people who do lifespan development, are on the same thing. Now, people are sort of familiar with Piaget and he has the concrete operations and formal operations and those kinds of things. Well, Piaget was a constructivist and Piaget's ideas, some people who have studied him in the original French have said that he was a constructivist by saying that what the child is doing is organizing their experience. In the US, we have a tendency to say it's organizing the environment, that it's the environment that they're making sense of, rather than that it's their experience. But there are these consistent phases or steps in development that Maslow, Loevinger, other developmental psychologists, Ken Wilbur has integrated and synthesized all of them. He's an independent scholar that knows everything about everything and makes sense of it.
But I think it's useful for us to be aware that we need to understand the stage of evolution that is perceived in. So for example, if a person is in that really almost childhood stage where they're primarily focused on power and safety and security and getting things for themselves and tit for tat responses to people that get in their way and things like that, there are a few adults around who behave like that. Some of them are in the news a lot, and that's almost like dealing with someone with a sociopathic personality. They haven't gotten to a point where they've evolved into seeing themselves as connected with others, which is where we get into, I think high school as the place in our lives, that adolescent time, we want to make sure that we fit in, we get along, we belong, we identify with our school or our church or whatever it is.
Okay. Someone who's in that stage of development, they're going to have a very strong sense of relationship, who they are as a relationship. They'll probably think of themselves as a parent or sibling or what their job is or something like that. So, working with someone in that perspective, you need to be aware of that and be conscious of them. If a person is in, or probably many people who would go into therapy would be in that next stage where they're finding out that there's an individuality to themselves, finding out that they can still be members of their family, but they can be off doing something that's different. They're, again, developing their own skills and that's what comes from getting a good education and evolving that stage of evolution we are in. And then they can evolve beyond that to the constructivist or postmodern view where they can look back on all of those skills they developed and all of those characteristics as being ways that they could make sense of the world and make it meaningful.
But they're within a context of and the idea that we don't know what the final answer is, before it even makes sense to even ask questions about the final answer. So those stages of evolution, I'm coming to see, is more and more important in working with people therapeutically, knowing where a person is coming from, because that's how we create the sense of identity as being different in each of these stages. Where our identity is with our group, our identity is with my own ideas and beliefs in life. My identity is as part of the group, part of the larger group, part of the worldwide group.
Sara Wilson: So, as we're coming to a close with our conversation, I was just wondering if there is anything else you'd like to share with our audience?
Spencer A. McWilliams: Well, I think about this in terms of the writing that I've done over the last 20 years, and you referred to, that in my writing, what I'm trying to do, I'm very much a scholar. I have lots and lots of citations and a big, long, long set of references. But for me, those references that I refer to in the body of the paper are ways of pointing a direction for someone who might be reading, and saying, "If you want to know more about this, here's where you should find it." Sort of like finding the path to different reasonings. So don't just take what I've said, but if it's piqued your interest, here's where you can really find out more about it. And I would say that what I would emphasize in life is to continue finding out more about things, and ourselves too, come to know ourself and to see the rigidities and all the problems in the way that we come to develop this hardened notion of who we are, begin to let go of some of these ways of being. And it's a lifelong process, and I know that when I was in my late 30s and I started doing meditation, working with Joko, she was saying that after about 20 years of sitting, you'll begin to get some benefit from it. I thought, “Oh my God, I don't have time for that.” Well, that's 40 years ago now and I'm still just beginning to get what the benefit is of it. So it's something that we continue throughout our entire lives if we're open to it and it gives us a lot more freedom.
Sara Wilson: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. This was such a cool conversation and I really think that every person, no matter their discipline, can learn something really valuable from your practice. So thank you.
Spencer A. McWilliams: Well, thank you very much for inviting me here.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.