Personal Paths of Mutual Recognition: Relational Patterns and Narrative Identities from a Personal Construct Perspective

Abstract This paper explores the intersubjective process of mutual recognition, drawing on a narrative-hermeneutic elaboration of Kelly’s personal construct theory. Kelly’s notions of dependency and role, Honneth’s and Ricoeur’s philosophical reflections on mutual recognition and intersubjective relationships, and Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative identity are considered, with a reference also to Benjamin’s relational psychoanalytic insight on the role of intersubjectivity in therapeutic relationships. Building on these contributions, the author proposes a differentiation between developmental trajectories—called “uncompleted paths of mutual recognition”—that supposedly derive from specific conditions of intersubjective imbalance. Such an imbalance is considered to be implicated in the majority of clinically significant cases of personal distress, in which the person suffers from a perceived lack of recognition from others. In doing so, the relational patterns relevant to such trajectories and the principal construct dimensions—often preverbalized constructions—that make up the narrative identities are tentatively outlined.