Constructivism in Practice:
David Mills and Conductive Reasoning
By Robert Hadden Mole
Vol. 5, Issue 2 (Fall 2001)

At PCT 2001, one of the features that made it a unique and worthwhile conference was the opportunity in the late afternoons for delegates to take part in a number of theoretically grounded activities.  Perspectives were broadened through drumming, drawing, yoga, and several other pursuits.  All of the workshops made quite an impression, but perhaps David Mills’ workshop on embodied personal meanings made the biggest one.  Following is the results of an e-mail interview with David on his work, Conductive Reasoning, how it relates to PCP, and how he uses it in practice.

1. In a nutshell, a quick definition of what you do.
Basically, I am free-lance action researcher and educator.  My primary field of study is the ways in which individuals embody as well as construct personal meaning.  My central idea, which I call Conductive Reasoning is largely a synthesis of PCP and F. M. Alexander’s “psycho-physical re-education.”

2. What is the history behind your work? What kinds of work preceded it? Who has written on/researched it prior to you?
The beginnings of my work lie in John Dewey’s support of, and what he saw as the wider significance of Alexander’s technique of “psycho-physical re-education.”  Dewey claimed that Alexander’s technique “bears the same relation to education that education itself bears to all other human activities.”  As I have been studying and teaching the Alexander Technique for the last 25 years, I have wondered just what Dewey meant by that, what he really saw in Alexander’s work.  I found in personal construct psychology a framework for exploring just what it was that Dewey saw.

3. How is your work theoretically related to Kellian Constructivism?
The ways in which I structure the conversations is a straightforward constructivist eliciting of distinctions/constructs.  One of the things Kelly says that I don’t think has been fully explored is that the construction of meaning includes both what we can verbally label and what he calls the “utterly inarticulate.”  As Constructivists we recognize that personal meaning is not limited to what can be “explicitly formulated” but also that which is embodied in action.  So what Alexander contributes is a means for exploring ways in which the dimensions of that construction are already articulated in the qualities of a person’s moving.  Kelly had that line about a person being “a form of motion” and the meaning of that phrase is certainly not limited to what we ordinarily construe as physical movement.  But my point is that it is never separable from it either.  It echoes back to Aristotle, with every kind of change being a kind of motion.  For us, being embodied—what Dewey called live creatures—every kind of change is a kind of motion—which always involves reconstruing and always involves bodily movement.  And what I have worked to develop is a method of actually studying these relationships rather than just admitting them.

4. Expand on some details that explain the essentials of your work.
The essence of my work is the concept of what I call Conductive Reasoning, which incorporates the dimensionality of the construction of meaning and the continuity of its embodiment in movement.  In practice I am sometimes working with the neglected psychological aspects of physical learning (e.g., stage performance, athletic activity, work related stress), and sometimes I am dealing with the neglected physical dimensions of apparently mental or emotional situations.  In both sorts of situations, a key idea is that the way in which a person’s processes are “psychologically channelized…” are also at the same time physically channelized.  Just as learning to attend to how we are constructing meaning gives us greater choice, flexibility etc. regarding the meanings we construct, learning to attend to how we embody meaning gives us the capacity to embody a wider and subtler range of meaning.  As Kelly noted in his example of the man who says he will not take a drink tomorrow, we often say one thing and then are distressed to find ourselves doing another.  This, I think, is the real “mind-body problem.”  It is a central practical problem of embodiment.  The method I call Conductive Conversation is a framework for exploring the ways in which actions embody conclusions drawn from the premises embodied in personal experience.  The construing involved is often kinesthetic as well as cognitive.

5. How is it related to other Kellian constructivist practice that is out there?
While any good constructivist clinician is dealing the whole person, and is at least implicitly aware of the importance of the embodied meanings that lie outside the range of what a person can label, I think it is possible to do better than recognize that every action can be construed both as a “behavior” and also as a “movement,” and that just as action-as-behavior is “psychologically channelized”, so action-as-movement is “physically channelized,” then a means for attending to the ways a person embodies their anticipation of events can be a very powerful tool for reconstruing and changing.  I began my doctoral work with Laurie Thomas, at the Centre for the Study of Human Learning, Brunel University, when I read of their Conversational Science paradigm, which incorporates an awareness that the conversation involves the whole of the person’s experience/action, and I suggested using Alexander’s work as a way of carrying out the conversation itself in a more psycho-physically whole way.

6. What is your background?  How did you get on to constructivism?
Basically, I got waylaid… My primary interests were in physics and biophysics, and in how people learn and understand physical concepts.  I have explored the personal level of how students come to understand concepts in physics primarily in my teaching and tutoring over the years.  I was also interested in the social context of the public understanding of science, doing studies of the recombinant DNA debate (when it was new in the 1970’s) and the way that the meanings were being constructed by the various sides in that debate.  I found some books on PCP in the library somewhere and found that I had been using constructivist ideas to figure out how people construct their understanding of scientific concepts.  I copied two papers, Kelly’s “Psychology of the Unknown” and Allan Radley’s “Living on the Horizon” and from time to time these papers kept resurfacing from my files over the years since.  Something was up, but I didn’t know what it was yet.

While pursuing my scientific questions, I was spending my summers becoming increasingly involved with the Alexander Technique and came to see it as a kind of a biophysics of the whole human individual.  I was particularly struck by Dewey’s support of Alexander, and the seeming disinterest on the part of both Dewey’s supporters and Alexander’s in exploring what it was that Dewey really saw as the larger importance of Alexander’s work.  Although Alexander in his writings talks about how it is the whole human person and the totality of their actions and reactions that matters, in practice the Alexander Technique often ends up looking like it is primarily concerned with physical matters.  I had a complementary frustration in reading about personal construct theory, because as I read him, Kelly was clearly talking about that whole human person.  I was struck by the claim that PCP abandoned the “division of psychology into cognition, affectation, and conation.”

But in practice it is primarily psychological and inattentive to the physical dimensions of experience.  So the genesis of my work was in seeing that looking at each of them from the perspective of the other could produce an approach that was as whole in practice as it was in theory.  What allowed me to really do that was my discovery of Laurie Thomas and Sheila Harri-Augstein’s conversational science approach.  They wrote about the conversational reconstruction of personal meaning in the context of the whole person so it seemed natural to propose using Alexander’s work as a way of generating conversations that were more fully psycho-physical, that is, embodied ways of exploring embodiment.

7. How did you start this work?
I first read some Kelly back about 1975 and for some reason made copies of those two papers, “The Psychology of the Unknown” and “Living on the Horizon” and then went about my business.  In all of that investigation of how people learn science and understand scientific concepts I was sort of an informal constructivist.  One or the other of those papers would resurface every once in a while as my Alexander Technique career proceeded to undermine my academic career, until at some point I realized that their synthesis was my career.  I had reached the point of being a PhD candidate with a proposed thesis on using PCP to study how students construct their understanding of concepts in physics, when my own advice caught up with me.  When some of my successful tutoring students at the university asked about what they ought to do next, I usually said something like find what you want to do, find the people in the world who are doing that best, and go study with them.  Then I found Laurie and Sheila’s work and said, “Hmmm…”  My career got seriously reconstrued.

8. Can you tell us a story of one or two people who have been touched by your work?  What impact did it have on them?
I suppose the best examples would be those where the issues at hand initially seemed to be physical, but turned out to be much more (without ceasing to be fully physical, of course), like the massage therapist who, upon gaining a sudden freedom and flexibility in her lower back as she walked, turned and said “I have to make a lot of money!”  We then got to explore how she had been using her back muscles to construe meaning of her need to “support herself.”  Or the one who was literally “holding herself together” to keep from being overwhelmed by grief, but whose way of holding back the emotional flood caused her physical pain.  She was able to find a third choice between the horns of that dilemma by attending to how she was embodying her concepts of what she needed to do to not be overwhelmed.

Possibly my best example is a woman who first came to a class with the question about being able to be more comfortable physically and to form certain physical activities with less stressful effort.   Initially being surprised by her ability to perform simple actions with less strain, she soon expanded the range of convenience of the principles to wider and wider domains, from dealing with her children and changing her diet to battling a school district administration, to presiding over a large national organization.

One other example I can think of is a novelist who first came to me because his forearms were so tense that he was unable to type (an obvious problem if one is writing a novel) but we soon found ourselves exploring how this and other tensions were involved in his embodiment of his idea of what it meant to “be creative.”  We’ve continued to explore how his life and his work as a novelist continue to interfere with each other.  Our conversations are often “philosophical” and concerned with the underlying logic of his interpretation of events.  But the key to most of them is that when he is able to attend to the quality of how he is actually doing, what he is doing at any given moment, he is able to make the philosophical insights concrete and put them into actual practice.

9. What are the future directions of your work?
I mentioned that Dewey referred to Alexander’s work as bearing the same relationship to education that education bears to all other human activity.  There is another quote from Dewey to the effect that recognizing that there are no “purely physical” or “purely mental” behaviors is a measure of civilization, that indeed “we may use the amount of distance which separates them in our society as a test of the lack of human development in that community.”  I’m not sure how we would define the relationship that education bears to the rest of human activity, or what we would call something that bore the same relationship to it, but whatever it is, I think it is the basis for the kind of education we are going to need in order to have a human culture that is continuous with the natural world and therefore sustainable.  In the future I want to continue to explore the continuity in action between human intention and the qualities of natural process, and to explore how those fundamental layers of the constructive embodiment of meaning—on both the individual and collective levels—form the basis of such a culture.

David currently practices at The Performance School in Seattle, WA.