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Gewürzt
@skydancer
https://nyti.ms/2jOD8lE
Construing the ‘ten meter tower’
Working with Personal Construct Psychology, I am regularly asked what we mean by ‘construing’. I also hear comments that it is all about ‘how people think’, and that it is a cognitive theory. In fact, PCP makes no particular distinction between thinking and feeling, believing that these things are not easily distinguished from each other, or from other processes such as intuiting, or sensing in the body.
I respond to these questions and comments in a variety of ways, but often leave the conversation feeling that I haven’t been able to adequately describe the subtlety and complexity of what what we mean when we talk about personal construing.
And now I have found this little film. ‘Ten Meter Tower’ is a short documentary (about 15 minutes) by Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson. With the purpose of exploring the theme of doubt, they invited people who had never been on a 10-meter diving tower before to climb, and jump.
We see a series of volunteers on the platform, living through their moment of choice, and grappling with the meanings of jumping, or not. Yes, there is a lot of thinking, there is calculation, and deliberation about logistics, but this seems to be inextricably woven with strong feelings including fear, even terror, about the height and depth of the plunge, and a powerful experience of the aloneness of the self on the platform. They are anticipating what it might mean to jump or to back down, and it seems that core identity is at stake for many participants. Who are they, and who will they be? if they jump, or if they don’t jump? in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others? A few of the volunteers climb in pairs, and the continuous disruption and reconfiguration of their construing in relation to the other is extraordinary to witness.
As each person arrives on the platform, we see the shiver and the tremble, hear the self-talk, the breathing and the knuckle-cracking. We are witnessing the physical, emotional, cognitive, imaginative, instinctive, gut-flipping moment. This is anticipation, and this is meaning-making. Processes such as thinking or feeling are impossible to isolate from each other.
This is construing.
Mary Francis
http://www.constructivistconsulting.net/