KELLY’S PIONEER

WORK ON PERSONAL
CONSTRUCT
Syeda Batool Najam
Understanding Individual Personal Construct
Institute of Business Management
• George Alexander Kelly, originator of personal construct theory of personality, was
born on farm near Perth Kansas. He was the only child of Elfleda Merriam Kelly
and Theodore Vincent Kelly. 
• When Kelly was four, his family moved to Eastern Colorado to make a claim on
land given to settlers for free by the U. S. government. Because no water could be
located beneath the land, the family moved back to the Kansas farm.
• Kelly's early schooling was, by his own words, "rather irregular." 
• He had wanted to pursue work in physiological psychology but found little
opportunity to do so. So he turned his attention to an area he felt needed some
work—providing clinical psychological services to adults and school-aged children
on the university's campus. These services included counseling (vocational and
academic), academic skill development, psychotherapy, and speech therapy.
• Eventually, there was a demand for these services beyond campus, and Kelly
developed a program for a clinic that traveled to schools in rural Kansas, there
providing diagnostic formulations and treatment recommendations for students,
typically twelve per day. At this time the United States was in the grips of a severe
economic depression and the Midwest had experienced a major drought.
Economic devastation was commonplace and many families were distressed. Kelly
and his crew of four to five undergraduate and graduate students found people
who had serious problems in their daily living. The need for these services was so
strong and publicly recognized that the state legislature funded the traveling clinic
directly through a legislative act.
• The conditions which challenged Kelly to reconstrue his own psychological outlook were formed
together with the exigencies of his clinical practice where he found that people needing to change
themselves were not significantly helped by either behaviorism or psychoanalysis.
• Kelly despaired of S => R psychology at an early stage, detecting a serious degree of vagueness in
the definition of "stimulus" and "response", and as Kelly himself said,
• "I never did find out what that arrow stood for".
• He subsequently turned to Freud who he later abandoned, partly because he found the theoretical
constructs to be too elastic (and thereby capable of appearing to explain everything), and partly also
because he found that when he invented non-Freudian 'insights' for his clients (often composing
preposterous interpretations) that many of these still worked surprisingly well.
• He found that Freudian approaches to psychological problems worked to help some of the people he
saw, but that his own formulations also worked if they were relevant to the person's problem and
provided the person with a different way of looking at the problem. In these constructions one can
see the seeds of Kelly's constructive alternativism. 
In his view, different people have alternative ways of looking at the world, and each view can capture
some element of truth. None are right or wrong, all views are constructed by the individuals and reflect
reality for them. In a way, people construct their own reality.
• The major reviews of his work were positive and enthusiastic particularly those written
by Jerome Bruner and Carl Rogers. However, because many general readers do not
appreciate the fact that quite different charts are used in voyaging with Kelly's theory,
there have been many mis-construals and misunderstandings of the main thrust and
direction of the theory. Consequently, personal construct psychology has been
described as many very different and often conflicting things. in many modern
psychology texts, the theory is described as a "cognitive" approach to personality.
Gordon Allport, following one of Kelly's lectures, described it as an "emotional" theory,
and later that same afternoon Kelly relates how Henry Murray approached him to tell
him that he was really an existentiallst". Kelly states that he subsequently, stepped
into almost all the open manholes that psychological theorists can fall into". Giving
examples of this he tells us that personal construct theory has been categorized as -
• "...a learning theory, a psychoanalytic theory (Freudian, Adlerian, and Jungian - all three),
a typically American theory, a Marxist theory, a humanistic theory, a logical positivistic
theory, a Zen Buddhistic theory, a Thomistic theory, a behaviouristic theory, an
Apollonian theory, a pragmatistic theory, a reflective theory, and no theory at all.''
•From these comments it is clear that Kelly's
theory has been treated somewhat like a
Rorschach inkblot, wherein people can find
what they expect to see, by reading in the
light of their own theories and therefore not
being able to discern the radically different
nature of the theory.
• By throwing overboard a very large part of the philosophical assumptions and
theoretical jargon of mainstream psychologies, Kelly immediately created a great
difficuIty for his potential readership despite the fact that his theory is one of the
few existing in psychology which is formerly stated in the style of a Fundamental
Postulate with 11 elaborative corollaries. It was as if he set sail for a little known
but much desired destination (psychotherapeutic change in clients) but refused to
use the same conventional stellar configurations in his navigational calculations
(theoretical constructs) because he saw them as poor aids to one's voyage.
Instead, he re-charted the mysterious expanse along completely different lines
and within a completely different framework
Religious Influence
Adam and Eve are given the opportunity by God to lead a life of
obedience and passivity in the Garden. The only thing they are
forbidden to do is eat from the Tree of Knowledge. This of course
they do, as a result of which they understand the difference
between good and evil. They are then expelled for ever from the
Garden. We, their descendents carry this burden of sin; we lead lives
of misery in this vale of tears. No matter how hard we might try,
there can be no return to the idyllic existence of passivity and blind
obedience.
• Kelly proposes a personal construct analysis of the myth in which personal constructs are focused on action and
choice, not mere cognition. There are three choices: companionship versus loneliness, knowledge versus obedience,
and good versus evil. The author of Genesis, Kelly says, recognized these as central to the human condition; each of
us is confronted with such choices. We might try to evade them, in what he sees as abortive attempts to return to
the Garden. And the ultimate choice is between good and evil.
• Faced with this, we might imagine that we can do nothing, but of course doing nothing is itself a choice. So, for
example, the person who does not intervene to expose cruelty or corruption is indeed making a choice, doing
something, no matter how much they might tell themselves otherwise. Looking the other way is indeed a moral
choice. Echoing the work of Mowrer and Szasz (although he mentions neither), Kelly argues that psychiatry tries to
redefine sin in medical terms. Indeed scientists and philosophers also try to avoid the good/evil issue, but it is in the
end inescapable.
• Perhaps Kelly’s main message in the paper is that we cannot define sin by referring to any sacred text or indeed any
other authority. Sin is defined personally and is to be understood in terms of deviation from one’s core role. For
Kelly, ‘role’ referred to any personal construction undertaken in the light of what we see as others’ perception of us.
Core role concerns how we evaluate ourselves in the light of the perception of others that are central to us. In the
article he asks the reader to compare how they would feel differently if they had an accident, and if a child in their
care had one. The second is likely to produce guilt if one feels they have fallen short of the child’s expectation of care
and protection. This individualized definition of sin and guilt perhaps reflects Kelly’s roots in Protestantism. His
father was a Presbyterian minister and he attended a Quaker college in his youth. Indeed he ends the paper saying
that he is merely elaborating what Jesus said about sin: ‘Go and sin no more’. Repentance (as opposed to
atonement) means resolving to act differently in the future.
Philosophical Influence
• John Dewey
• Realism
 The Energy Crisis
• Psychic Energy - the force that lies behind all mental processes
• Libido - the energy of the sexual drive as a component of the life instinct
• The kind of energy required is sometimes called mental, or psychic energy, also known as libido, and only a fixed and finite amount
is available at any given moment. Therefore, energy spent doing one thing, such as pushing uncomfortable thoughts out of
memory, is unavailable for other purposes, such as having new and creative ideas. One goal of psychoanalysis is to free up more
psychic energy—or computing capacity—for the challenges of daily living, by removing neurotic conflicts one by one.
• Kelly's theory has been construed as psychoanalytic theory while he himself claims that personal construct psychology is
completely non dynamic. Kelly would agree with Bateson's view that the concept of energy is completely inappropriate to
psychology. The central problem with the concept is that in boot legging it into psychology the smugglers seemed not to have
detected the accompanying assumption of 'stasis' which, once imported, must be explained away, by using notions such as
'motivation', 'drive', 'stimulus', etc. If you buy the notion of energy, you get a job lot which includes the idea that the universe (and
humanity as part of it) is 'inert'. Kelly takes the opposite view when he says that "the organism is delivered fresh into the
psychological world alive and struggling".
• This assumption removes what Vaihinger called the 'fiction of force' from the psychological arena. Kelly took great care to ensure
that his theory was "utterly innocent of any forces, motives or incentives", since he believed that using notions such as 'motivation'
or ‘psychodynamics' "is the kind of explanation we resort to when we don't want to bother to understand a person". His theory sets
out with the assumption that the world is in a state of continuous movement and change. This assumption obviates the task most
other theories have to explain how a person is 'prodded' into action by one postulated force or another. He went on to state that
"since I assume that we start with a process I am struck with the disturbing thought that personal construct theory may be the only
truly dynamic theory available to psychology". In these terms, personal construct psychology is either "an all-out dynamic theory or
an all-out nondynamic theory !
 The Intervention Crisis
• The second major misconstrual of personal construct theory is that it is behaviouristic. Many psychologists are concerned
with the "production of behaviour" as the end resuIt of their enterprise. In learning theory the objective is to produce
changes in the 'client's behavioural responses', and these changed responses are the answer or solution. In this sense, the
role of the person is as an "intervening variable" whose main "intervention" is to simply mediate between a stimulus and
the end-response produced. In other words, it is the person's task to process environmental events into behaviours.
• The behavioural cycle which begins with an evoking (questioning) stimulus and which ends with an answering response (or
the produced behaviour) is not a model that Kelly would espouse. lnstead Kelly emphasises the human's capacity
to construe the world as opposed to merely responding to it. The world can only be known through our constructions of it
and therefore our behaviour bridges the gap between, on the one hand, our constructions / mapping of the world, and on
the other hand, the, world itself. Our behaviour is seen as a way of posing a question about our 'maps' of the world. Our
maps lead us to expect certain features of the landscape to appear in relation to one another (for example we expect to
find an oasis over the next sand dune) and our behaviour (walking over that next dune) tells us how accurate our map is,
sometimes to our relief, sometimes to our devastation.
• Our behavioural experiments are ways of asking questions rather than ways of offering conclusions. Behaviour is therefore
"the instrument of its own exploration". [12] From this point of view, the cycle of experimentation begins with an action
which is seen as a probe into reality designed to test the validity of the personal hypothesis or construct which the person
has previously placed upon the world, and with which he is now experimenting. The cycle of experimentation therefore
ends with an experimental outcome or result which will serve to validate or invalidate the anticipations which the action-
probe was designed to test. Human behaviour is not seen as a problem which needs to be controlled, but rather is
construed as our main instrument of inquiry.
 The Emotional Crisis
• One of the most common misconstruals of personal construct psychology is that it is a "cognitive" theory. This confusion largely arises from an
assumption that all our discriminations are essentially cognitive in nature. However, Kelly's theory points out that there are not only "cognitive"
constructs but also constructs which have no verbal label attached to them. These are fundamental human discriminations which take place at different
"somatic" levels, including physiological, vegetative, emotional, behavioural etc.
• It should be pointed out that constructs are not 'verbal' at all. Constructs are usually confused with the verbal labels we assign to them. Before we have
reached the stage of assigning verbal labels we have already made our discriminations by cleaving events into similarities and differences. This line of
cleavage is then labeled where possible. A simple example is to look at how the Irish and English cleave themselves mutually into racial stereotypes. The
Irish prefer to view themselves as 'pastoral', 'in love with the land', 'in touch with nature' etc., while polarising the English as 'urbanised imperiallsts,
plundering other countries for weaIth' etc. The English for their part construe the Irish as 'crude peasants with pigs in the kitchen' while seeing
themselves as 'refined, civilized' etc. Here we can see that the same line of cleavage is drawn between the two parties, but the way it is labeled alters
with the labeler. While anticipations are easily understood in terms of verbally labeled constructs (for example, tonight's party will be 'exciting'), pre-
verbal anticipations are less well understood, even though construing on the basis of our tacit knowledge  [l3] is more pervasive. A simple example of pre-
verbal construing is descending your stairs at 4.00 a.m. in the pitch dark. Somehow your feet 'know' how many steps there are to negotiate. Invalidation
of your feet's construing occurs when an extra anticipated step turns out to be 'missing' and you consequently stumble. This general area is well
indicated by Polanyi's phrase "we always know more than we can say." It is easy to understand why this is so when we recall that most pre-verbal
constructs evolved in infancy, and were therefore designed to construe those events of which an infant would be aware. No matter how aware one is
that the child is father of the construing man there are many pre-verbal constructs which can never be articulated in language.
• In therapy it is likely that a client is grasping for a pre-verbal construct when he is willing to sacrifice precision of description in order to retain his elusive
feelings and thoughts which are fast receding. Preverbal constructs represent a relatively low level of cognitive awareness, but are not to be equated
with the 'unconscious' since they may be communicated by means other than words. Often when a client attempts to verbalize pre-verbal constructs he
becomes confused and resorts to indicating the events to which the constructs apply. We often have the impression that the client is "struggling to
make sense out of some experience that lies just beyond the reach of his semantic language". [24] Kelly describes the therapist's dilemma in such an
encounter as "like handling a live fish in the dark; not only does it wiggle but it is slippery and hard to see". [15] Above all it must be emphasized that
construing involves a total personal discriminative act as opposed to a largely 'cognitive' or 'affective' act. As we saw in the discussion of pre-verbal
constructs above there is not necessarily anything 'cognitive' or 'affective' about them as construals. It is the total human who construes, not merely his
brain or his guts.
The 'emotional crisis' arises only when people misunderstand Kelly's
integrative-constructive framework which wishes to avoid splits such as the
mind-body dichotomy. Kelly wanted to keep in view the sense-making
enterprise of the whole organism. He wanted to avoid the fragmentation of
the whole human into all the usual psychological pigeonholes and he thus
created a theory which attempted to avoid arbitrary compartmentalisation.
However, neither did he want to take recourse in the type of bland holism
which refuses to make explicit distinctions. The only way he could escape this
'fragmental' vs. 'holistic' dichotomy was to be constructive. Kelly meant
'constructive' in both senses of the word, namely, constructive vs. destructive,
and constructive in the sense of inventing something completely new.