Go to photo / 2005 Update: James Mancuso, In Memoriam

This year, NAPCN honors Jim Mancuso with its lifetime achievement award.  Dr. Mancuso has been a prominent member of the personal construct psychology community for over 30 years.  He is most deserving of the award.  Following is a short biography of Jim’s life so far.

James Carmine Mancuso was born in Hazelton, Pennsylvania on January 17, 1928.  His mother, Dolores, was the first child of immigrants from the area south of Italy’s Bay of Salerno.  His father, Vincenzo, had emigrated from Sersale, in Italy’s province of Catanzaro.  After his father died in 1938, Jim was sent to the Milton Hershey boarding school in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where he attended from 1939 to 1945.  Hershey was a vocational school, and Jim learned baking there.  He relied on this skill for full and part-time employment until 1952.

In 1946, Jim entered the United States Navy.  He served for two years, attaining the rank of Seaman, First Class.  He received training as a journalist, serving with the public information office of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranian Sea.  After his Navy service, Jim used his GI Bill benefits to attend Dickinson College in Carlisle Pennsylvania.  He received a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and English in 1951. During this time he also worked on and received his teaching certification from Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania.  Soon after, Jim was awarded a Veteran’s Administration Fellowship to attend the University of Rochester.  He started graduate studies there in 1952, and was awarded his Ph.D. in psychology in 1958.

While completing his doctoral dissertation, Jim worked as a school psychologist.  In this work he found himself “totally inadequate to the task of understanding the problems of the children”.  To help tackle his perceived inadequacy, Jim read Piaget’s work, including The Construction of Reality in the Child.  He also found himself attracted to the writings of Donald Hebb and Muzafir Sherif.   Around this time, Jim happened to attend a seminar at Rochester in which someone made a comment to the effect of “That sounds like something which would agree with the ideas in George Kelly’s Psychology of Personal Constructs”.  As soon as the seminar was over, Jim went to the library and borrowed Kelly’s two volumes, staying awake that night reading the book.  He found it highly congruent with the reading he had already been attracted to. Moreover he found Kelly’s constructive alternativism to be congruent with his childhood experiences.  As a child, Jim had ample opportunity to test alternative constructions through varied experiences including; growing up a scion of Italian immigrant coal miners, attending a mainly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant/Irish-American elementary school, the death of his father at 10 years of age, and spending six years at the Milton Hershey school under the influence of the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Jim continued his interest in Kellian constructivism on to his teaching days at SUNY Albany.  When one of his graduate students asked him to produce empirical bases for Kelly’s postulate and corollaries, Jim took the challenge.  He began to gather articles in support of Kelly’s work.  By 1966, Jim had amassed a sizable collection, and invited George Kelly to come to Albany from Brandeis look over it.  Kelly spent a day with Jim, and was very enthusiastic about the project.  Unfortunately, he died soon after, and never saw Jim’s final plans for publication.  In 1970, the collection appeared as Readings for a Cognitive Theory of Personality.  By any standard, it is a remarkable work. “Readings” unites the contributions of such well-known figures in psychology as Jerome Bruner, Carl Rogers, Muzafir Sherif, Jean Piaget, Charles Osgood, Solomon Asch, Irving Janis, Julian Rotter, and John Flavell (as well as George Kelly himself).  It is no wonder Kelly was enthusiastic about the project.

After “Readings” appeared, Jim began communicating with Alvin Landfield of the University of Nebraska.  Also at this time, Jim became attracted to the work of Ted Sarbin, and began an association with him.  It was Jim who recommended that Sarbin serve as a keynote speaker for the First International Congress on personal construct psychology at Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1975.  Thus began Jim’s long association with personal construct psychology.
During his many years of association with PCP, Jim led a productive career as a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany.  He held this position from 1961 until 1992, when he retired.  In addition to professorial duties, Jim served as the Associate Dean of Albany’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences from 1985 to 1991.  He was also the Interim Dean of the School of Mathematics and Sciences for the years 1991-1992, at the College of Saint Rose in Albany.

Throughout his academic career, Jim produced many important writings.  In addition to “Readings”, Jim also published Schizophrenia: Medical Diagnosis or Moral Verdict (1980) with Ted Sarbin.  This book was selected as an outstanding academic textbook by Choice in 1981.  He also co-edited two very successful books with Jack Adams-Webber, The Construing Person (1982), and Applications of Personal Construct Theory (1983) .  He joined Mildred Shaw for his third productive collaboration, turning out his fifth book, Cognition and Personal Structure (1988).  In his last three books, Jim authors several chapters.  Together with other book chapters and articles he has written, Jim has published about 60 works, (with more currently in press).  He has designed computer software, including the programs The Parent Role Repertory Analysis System (PAREP Grid) and The Self Role Repertory Analysis System (SELFGRID).  He also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology, and manages the The Personally Constructed Home Page, which is devoted to topics of personal construct psychology.

Outside of his profession, Jim has lent his talents to a number of community service agencies related to Italian-American affairs.  He is a member of Order of the Sons of Italy.  He is a founding member of the Italian-American Community Center in Albany.  He is on the Board of Directors of the Italian-American Cultural Foundation, and served as the foundation’s vice-president for cultural affairs from 1972 to 1996.  He lectures frequently on the topic of Italian culture.  And he manages a web site (http://www.crisny.org/not-for-profit/soi) concerning Italy-to-the-USA immigration.

Jim met Susan Rose Kuca in Buffalo, a registered nurse who worked with him at the Buffalo Veteran’s Hospital.  They married in 1954.  They have three grown children; Renee, Michele, and Martin who have each gone on to pursue their own professional careers.

Jim Mancuso; scholar, teacher, counselor, writer and recognized theorist, receives this year’s NAPCN lifetime achievement award.  And he continues to achieve.  He presents at this year’s Congress on Constructivism in Psychotherapy in Siena, Italy.  He also continues his work on constructivist approaches to explaining emotional life.  Even now with the lifetime achievement award to his credit, he will no doubt continue to be a vital contributor to personal construct psychology.

James Mancuso