Where is the ‘Problem’?

Agential Realism Opens Up the Toolkit

Psychologists write reports on people. We use a battery of tests, measures, talk of skills in comparison to norms, age groups, the bell curve and standard deviations all aimed to describe the uniqueness of each single person’s needs and their characteristics in relation to others.

"Agential realism overturns that notion. It offers us the framework to be able to change our focus away from person, away from looking within a person to find out what is making them behave in a certain way, to focus instead on the process that is making that person. What opportunities are available for this person to do actions?"

I think a good analogy is cheese-making. Cheese is the end product of a process that is centuries old. Individual cheeses can be judged and assessed, ranked on their quality, be known by their unique quality of tastes and textures. A cheese can be assessed.

But, if I am a cheesemaker, the components that go into making the cheese are my primary concern. The milk, the animals, the season, the aging process, the bacteria, the grass, the cheese-maker’s skills and knowledge of the process.

To apply the analogy…. psychology looks at the end product, the outcome of behaviour-making, the person. Humanism. The assumption is that within each human, being human, being that human, is the source of our uniqueness. Because the person is the focus, then psychology has concentrated, and still concentrates, its effort on describing and cataloguing details of ‘the person’. The assumption is that we will find the reason for behaviour within the person.

Agential realism provides us with the model that allows us to move our focus away from the person, and instead, read and understand the process that makes a person.

What this means for psychology is profound. Psychometric testing must become irrelevant as the ethics of ascribing a statistical boundary around a person is exposed and challenged.

The contest for authority between competing humanist models can wither away, exposed as powerful professional opinions with a multitude of practices that claim the right to ‘explain’ behaviours, but which ultimately have not resulted in a wave of wellbeing or agreement on how to ‘explain’ behaviour. The endless expansion of clinical categories to describe behaviours, the thingification of behaviour, can be replaced by analysis of the means by which behaviours are being created. The idea of assessing one person at a time, classifying their needs, can be replaced by a system that can offer individuals access to dynamic self-regulating monitoring of their wellbeing actions.

As I progress in writing these blogs and sharing ideas, I hope the intricacies behind bold, simplistic claims will become clear.