J O U R N A L O F

FAMILY THERAPY
Journal of Family Therapy (2010) 32: 358361
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6427.2010.00521.x

The self beyond words: comment on Is there a place

for individual subjectivity within a social
constructionist epistemology

Sheila McNameea

Roy-Chowdhury (2010) is on a quest to reclaim the subject in construc-

tionist practice, specifically therapeutic practice. His argument rests on
the claim that there is no subject, no self, no individual outside language
in social construction. To be sure, the notion of a self-contained, privately
cognizing individual is dismissed within social construction, noting
instead that knowledge of self and world is a byproduct of relational
interchange. As Lock and Strong (2010, p.7) put it, meaning and
understanding have their beginnings in social interaction, in shared
agreements as to what these symbolic forms are to be taken to be. The
relational self social constructions version of the self is very much alive
and well. The relational self is very much a person.

The constructionist starts with the premise of relational being. We are

born into relations and in these relations we coordinate our activities
in ways that construct patterns of action; forms of life (Wittgenstein,
1953). Relational processes are our means of generating a sense of
how and who to be in the world. The shift in attention to relational
processes that construct identities and away from identities that are
beyond relational processes is an important one, and makes it difficult
to argue that there is a person or subject who pre-exists these
coordinated engagements.
The constructionist focus on language is a focus on patterns of
relating; this is inclusive of aspects of human interchange that are
beyond words. Rather than assume that the unit of examination
should be the embodied individual, the constructionist is interested in
the relational processes by which an individual becomes a (particular
kind of) person. There are no pre-defined entities within [people]
that objective methods can seek to delineate but, rather, our ways of
making sense to each other are constructed to yield quite different

a
Professor Sheila McNamee, PhD, Department of Communication, University of New
Hampshire, 20 Academic Way, Durham, New Hampshire 03824, USA e-mail: E-mail:
smcnamee@cisunix.unh.edu.

r 2010 The Author

Journal of Family Therapy r 2010 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice. Published by
Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA.
 The self beyond words 359
ways of being selves (Lock and Strong, 2010, p.7). This does not mean
that there is no specificity (Sampson, 2008) to an individual; we each
have our unique engagement in various sets of relations. No two people
engage in exactly the same relations in the same contexts. An individuals
specificity, then, becomes a way of addressing uniqueness without
retreating to the self-contained individual as the primary unit of analysis,
or, to put it in other words, without retreating to a self-contained
individual who pre-exists human interchange (i.e., language).
We might better articulate the centrality of language in construc-
tionist work if we refer to language practices. This term includes much
more than written or spoken words or text. Language practices refer
to all the embodied activities that individuals perform. Language
practices entail aspects of interaction that are beyond the text.
Two brief illustrations might be useful. Tom Andersen, a well-
known systemic and constructionist therapist, was famous for asking
clients in therapy questions that explored the unsaid or the not-yet-
said the domain beyond words. If a client was talking about his
disappointment with his marriage, Tom might ask, If you were to
look into the word disappointed, what other words might you find?
Additionally, Harlene Andersons not-knowing stance offers another
illustration of the concern constructionists give to human engagement
that is beyond words. Harlenes not-knowing stance urges therapists
to become curious about the multiplicity of meanings that might be
present in the conversation; one should not be too quick to under-
stand. These are just two illustrations of the constructionist considera-
tion of actions that encourage departure from a unified narrative.
When people engage with one another, the said, the unsaid and the
imagined have meaning and it is the meaning made in relation with
others that generates the sense of the real for participants. It should
be noted that the real that is constructed is very real for participants.
Constructionists are not arguing against reality but against a unified,
objective, essentialist reality.
A second consideration and perhaps a more significant one is
what the constructionist emphasis on language implies. Philosophi-
cally, by centring language practices and not individuals as objects or
entities to be examined, the constructionist acknowledges that, with-
out language, without our relational performances, we would have no
sense of what is real, what is true, or what is self. The domain of our
exploration shifts radically from looking at self-contained individuals
to exploring what people do together. In other words, it is the situated
practices of persons in relation to one another and in historical and

r 2010 The Author

Journal of Family Therapy r 2010 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice.
360 Sheila McNamee
cultural contexts that become the focus of attention. Focusing in this
way however, does not imply that persons and their subjectivity is
ignored or neglected. The point and a very important point is that
our sense of what it means to be a person and what it means to live in
the world does not exist apart from the traditions and local practices
of communal interchange in which we participate.
As people talk, they invite others into particular relations and these
relations have their own unique moral implications. Yet these invita-
tions are also culturally and historically crafted and thereby infused
with understandings that include the discourses of power, gender, and
class all of which are subject to a multiplicity of understandings or
significance, or both.1 To talk of subjectivity (identity) does not require
one to adopt a static and fixed view, nor does it require abandoning an
ontology of subjectivity. We need only understand that this ontology is
a relationally (culturally and historically) crafted ontology.
Roy-Chowdhury claims that the

central preoccupation in this paper . . . [is] how to construct a meaningful

account of the speaking, relating subject, which [sic] is more than the
words used including the social and cultural discourses evoked within
each relationship and each encounter.
(Roy-Chowdhury, 2010, p. 344)
He wants to shed some light upon the person revealed in the talk
(Roy-Chowdhury, 2010, p. 345). In his attempt to reclaim the subject,
the author makes the (by now) familiar argument that all cannot be
reduced to discourse. We learn that constructionists claim that

The individual subject is, therefore, created and recreated, variously

within each interaction and neither the person herself, nor others, has
any privileged access to a real or a true self that transcends these
narrated versions. This relational self is a discursive construction,
conversationally created.
(Roy-Chowdhury, 2010, p. 343)
But, unfortunately, the point is that we cannot transcend language.
We do not live outside language. All that we know, all that we can do
or say, is possible because of language. Constructionists do not deny
1
Please note that I am not saying that discourses of gender, power or class are not
significant. I am saying that these discourses, themselves, are significant by virtue of the
relational processes that have rendered them dominant discourses within particular cultures,
times, and communities.

r 2010 The Author

Journal of Family Therapy r 2010 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice.
 The self beyond words 361
there is a physical world and thus, do not deny there is a subject or a
body. But the very terms by which we understand that physical
world (that subject) are not universal. Different communities coordi-
nate their activities, their realities, around different language games
(Wittgenstein, 1953).
The aim of Is there a place for individual subjectivity within a
social constructionist epistemology? is clear: to examine the adequacy
of the constructionist position that the person is encountered differ-
ently within different social contexts and to open up a space within
social constructionist discourse for a theory of individual subjectivity
(abstract). The means for doing so is psychoanalytic theory. I applaud
attempts to mix things up. Interesting questions can be posed about
the points where the relational emphasis of social construction and
psychoanalysis come together (or not) or inform each other in useful
ways. I am intrigued by such questions because, as a constructionist, I
am not committed to one, unified voice. Rather than critique psycho-
analysis in this comment (which, coincidentally, is never deconstructed
but, instead, is taken for granted as the privileged discourse), I have
attempted to clarify a murky understanding of the constructionist
emphasis on language and the ways in which that emphasis provides
us with a very complex understanding of the person. The self, in
constructionist work, is not erased and is not reduced to mere text.
Rather, as I have tried to articulate, there is no self, no power, no
gender, no class without languaging relations situated in diverse
cultures, traditions and local engagements.

References
Lock, A. and Strong, T. (2010) Social Constructionism: Sources and Stirrings in Theory
and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roy-Chowdhury, S. (2010) Is there a place for individual subjectivity within a
social constructionist epistemology? Journal of Family Therapy, 32: 342357.
Sampson, E. E. (2008) Celebrating the Other. Ohio: Taos Institute Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. Anscombe. New York:
Macmillan.

r 2010 The Author

Journal of Family Therapy r 2010 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice.