| Title: | The Flow of Choice |
| Author: | Philip Boxer |
| Category: | Published |
| Publication Year: | 1983 |
| Where Published: | In Mancuso J.C. & Adams-Webber J.R. (eds) ‘The Construing Person’, Praeger. |
The Choice Corollary: A person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomised construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system.
The Fundamental Postulate is a construction of the individual as a “process in being”. Like a flowing stream, the individual’s behaviour is construed as the dynamic choices implicit in his onward flow across the epigenetic landscape of his construing. The process of choice lies at the centre of the development of the individual’s construction system, and it is this system that forms the landscape that channelises the onward flow of the individual’s processes. Not only does the construction system construe its own extension and definition, thus setting itself apart as a self referential system, but also the construction system produces alternatives, the experience of which varies the construction system itself: the construction system has the capability of being self modifying. These two properties of the construction system have enormous implications for the autonomy of the individual in relation to others that can only be touched on in this chapter. The individual also experiences himself as self aware and conscious of the choices open to him within the context of that self awareness. There is a duality in this consciousness in that the individual can both think about himself the stream as seen from the point of view of the surrounding landscape and he can also think as himself the stream in being seen from the point of view of being the stream itself. This duality manifests itself to him on the one hand as a consciousness of choice and on the other hand as an awareness of choosing.
It is my intention to explore the Choice Corollary in this chapter from the point of view of choosing. The objective underlying this is to arrive at an understanding of what can go ‘wrong’ with this process as construed by the individual choosing.