Epistemologías · 1936

Constructivism

Constructivism holds that a person does not access reality as a passive receiver of data, but actively organises their experience through schemes, constructs, narratives, personal meanings, organising emotions and structures of anticipation. Its central point is not to deny the existence of an external reality, but to assert that human knowledge always appears mediated by the forms through which the subject differentiates, interprets, orders and makes sense of what they live. In psychology, this framework makes it possible to understand traditions such as Piaget's genetic epistemology, Kelly's personal construct psychology, von Glasersfeld's radical constructivism, Maturana and Varela's biology of cognition, and the clinical developments of Guidano, Mahoney, Neimeyer, Gonçalves and Feixas. A common idea appears in all these formulations: the subject knows from a prior organisation of experience, and that organisation may become rigid, limited or insufficient in the face of particular life crises. Clinically, constructivism shifts the focus from the mere correction of errors towards an understanding of how the person constructs their world, how they protect the coherence of their identity and how they can reorganise their personal system of meanings. The symptom is understood not only as a deficit, an irrationality or an observable dysfunction, but also as part of a way of maintaining continuity, predictability or meaning within a particular personal organisation. This framework is especially useful for locating models centred on identity, meaning, personal narrative, anticipation, emotional coherence, grief, the organisation of the self and change in personal knowledge systems. It also makes it possible to distinguish constructivist approaches from more rationalist cognitive therapies: the point is not merely to replace mistaken cognitions with more realistic ones, but to explore how a person organises their experience of themselves, of others and of the world. Its principal contribution to psychotherapy is to offer a deep reading of change as the reconstruction of meaning. Its risk, when applied simplistically, is to fall into excessive relativism or to neglect the bodily, social, material and biological dimensions of suffering.