J Kelly interesting facts about him. American psychologist George Alexander Kelly: biography

At times it seems that people have already studied everything that exists in the world. All the discoveries have been made, nanotechnology has been invented, and there is no longer a single area left, by studying which you can find something new and derive your own theory. But such a research environment still exists - human psychology. It seems that science will be sorting out its features for a very long time, but thanks to scientists like George Kelly, things will move forward.

First years of life

George Alexander Kelly (George Alexander Kelly) is an eminent psychologist who entered the pages of the history of the development of psychology as the creator of the theory of personal constructs. The psychologist was born on April 28, 1905 in Kansas into a family of ordinary farmers. He received his primary education at a local rural school, which had only one classroom. After graduation, George's parents send him to the nearest city, Wichita. George attends high school there.

As for the psychologist's family, his parents were devout. Dancing and card games were not revered in their house. They deeply respected the traditions of the West, except for George, they had no more children.

University years

After graduating from school, George Kelly studies at Friends University, where he spends 3 years. After that, he received another year of education at Park College. There in 1926 he received a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics. After finishing his studies, Kelly thought about starting a job as a mechanical engineer. But due to the influence of discussions that actively took place between universities, I became seriously interested in the social problems of society.

George Kelly recalls how in his first year the subject of psychology seemed very boring to him, the professor paid a lot of attention to theories, but they were not particularly interesting. But becoming interested in social problems, he entered the University of Kansas. There he studies sociology, pedagogy and work relations. In 1928, he wrote a dissertation on the topic “The manner of spending leisure time by representatives of the working class of Kansas,” for which he received a master’s degree.

Pedagogical activity

This did not stop the desire to learn from George Kelly. Immediately after receiving his master's degree, he moved to Scotland, where he conducted research at the University of Edinburgh. There he meets the famous teacher Godfrey Thompson and, under his guidance, writes dissertations on the problems of successful teaching. Thanks to her, he was able to receive a bachelor's degree in teacher education in 1930. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, he goes home to the University of Iowa. There he was presented as one of the applicants for the degree of Doctor of Psychology.

Immediately after returning, he sat down to write a dissertation, in which he studied in detail the factors influencing speech and reading disorders. He defended his doctorate in 1931, and in the same year he married a university teacher, Gladys Thompson.

Career

The American psychologist began his career working as a lecturer in physiological psychology at Fort Hays. After the onset of the Great Depression, Kelly retrained as a professor of clinical psychology, although he was not particularly prepared for this.

George Alexander Kelly's stay at Fort Hays College lasted for 13 years. During this time, the psychologist developed a program of portable clinics. Together with the students, the psychologist traveled around Kansas and provided psychological support to everyone, in particular, the main focus was on helping public schools.

For Kelly, such activities brought a lot of new knowledge. Based on his experience, he began to create a new theoretical basis for another psychological theory.

War and post-war years

The biography of George Kelly preserves memories of the terrible war and post-war years. When World War II began, the psychologist began to manage the program of training and psychological support for civilian pilots, and is part of the naval aviation. Later he transferred to the aviation medicine and naval surgery division. There he provided all possible assistance until the end of 1945.

After the war, there is a high need for psychological support in the country: soldiers who returned home from the front had many problems with their mental state. At this time, the development of clinical psychology reached a new level, and George Kelly brought a lot of new things to it. 1946 was a significant year for the psychologist; he was recognized as a state-level psychologist and given a position as head of the department of therapeutic psychiatry and psychology at Ohio University. Kelly spent almost 20 years in this honorable position.

During this time, he managed to create his own personality psychology. Created a psychological support program for the best graduates of US universities. In 1965, the professor’s long-time dream came true; he was invited to the Department of Sciences of Behavior and Morals at Brandeis University. Along with his dream come true, he gains freedom for his research and until the end of his life he continues to write a book consisting of numerous reports on psychology. The main attention was paid to the possibility of using the main components of the psychology of personal constructs to resolve international conflicts. George Kelly ended his glorious journey on March 6, 1967.

Bibliography

During his life, George Kelly not only became known as an outstanding psychologist who held leadership positions, but was also known as a researcher and writer. Thus, in 1955, a two-volume work entitled “Psychology of Individual Constructs” was published, which describes theoretical interpretations of the concept of “personality” and interprets variations in causal changes in personal constructs.

The year 1977 was marked by the publication of the work “New Trends in the Concept of Personal Constructs.” In 1989, students of the psychology department had the opportunity to read Kelly’s next book, “The Psychology of Constructs.” In 1985, a new work appeared on the shelves - “Development of the Psychology of Constructs.” All these books were published after the death of the scientist. He worked on them throughout his life, devoting every free minute to research. All his ideas and research were detailed in personal notes. Therefore, it was possible to systematize the professor’s work and publish several more books.

Features of work

George Kelly can be considered the founder of cognitive therapy. When working with patients, he, like many other psychologists of the time, used psychoanalytic interpretations and was amazed at the extent to which his patients accepted Freudian teachings. This was the beginning of an experiment: Kelly began to use interpretations from a variety of psychological schools and directions in his work.

This made it clear that neither the study of childhood fears nor the delving into the past that Freud recommended was fundamental. Psychoanalysis was effective only because it gave patients the opportunity to think differently. Simply put, Kelly discovered that therapy would only be successful if the client could re-interpret his experiences and aspirations. This also applies to the causes of disorders. For example, if a person is confident that the words of someone who is higher in status are a priori correct, then he will be upset if he hears criticism addressed to him.

Kelly helped his students understand their own attitudes and test them in practice. He was one of the first practicing psychologists to try to change the patient's way of thinking. Today this practice is considered basic to many therapeutic methods.

Psychology of Personality

Following his convictions, George Kelly was confident that it was possible to find a theory that would suit each patient, and most importantly, would quickly recognize his world system. This is how the concept of personal constructs emerged. Within the boundaries of this direction, each person is a researcher who views the world around him through personal categories and constructs that are characteristic only of an individual.

Kelly said that a person is not subject to his instincts, stimuli and reactions. Each individual is capable of exploring the world in his own way, assigning meanings and constructs to the environment and acting within their framework. The psychologist defined the constructs as bipolar scales. For example, “sociable-closed”, “smart-stupid”, “rich-poor”. Due to the fact that an individual views objects through these characteristics, it is possible to predict his behavior. Based on these developments, George Kelly created a special Repertoire Test of Role Constructs, in short, the Rep Test.

Rep test

George Kelly once said: “In order to help a person, you need to know how he sees the world.” That's why the Repertory Test was created. It is considered a good diagnostic technique and is perhaps more closely related to personality theory than any other psychological test.

The rep test consists of sequentially executing two processes:

1. Based on the proposed list of roles, the patient must make a list of persons who correspond to these roles.
2. The second process is the formation of constructs. To do this, the psychologist points to three written faces and asks the patient to describe exactly how two of them differ from the third. For example, if a list of a friend, father and mother is selected, then the patient may say that the father and friend are similar in their sociability, and the mother, on the contrary, is a rather reserved person. This is how the “shy-outgoing” construct appears.

In general, the test usually offers 25-30 roles that are considered significant for everyone. In the same way, from 25 to 30 triads are identified, and after each triad a new construct is generated in the patient. Constructs tend to repeat themselves, but in each test there are approximately 7 main areas.

Features and Application

George Kelly and personality construct theory revolutionized psychiatry. Thanks to the repertoire test, the subject can not only freely express his thoughts, but:

• Provides the most representative figures.
• The constructs obtained as a result of such research are indeed the prism through which a person understands the world.
• The constructs used by the subject give the psychologist a clear idea of ​​how the patient sees his past and future.

In addition, the Rep Test is one of the few developments in psychology that can be used in any field. Just by selecting the right roles, you can get countless constructs. So, in 1982, a Rep test was done to determine the constructs used by perfume buyers. Subsequently, the resulting constructs were used by advertising agencies. The advertising created using this material had a high conversion rate.

George Kelly studied human psychology all his life and achieved considerable success. And even today, the results of his research are used in various spheres of life.

George Alexander Kelly (April 28, 1905 – March 6, 1967) was an American psychologist and author of personality construct theory.

George Kelly's theory

Kelly's main work was published in 1955 - “The Psychology of Personal Constructs”. In it, the author sets out the author’s concept of the human psyche. According to Kelly, all mental processes proceed along the paths of predicting events in the surrounding world. Man is not a slave to his instincts, not an obedient toy of stimuli and reactions, or even a self-actualizing self. A person within the framework of the theory of personal constructs is a scientist who studies the world around him and himself. The main concept of the theory is a construct, the main means of classifying objects in the surrounding world - a bipolar scale, for example - “good-bad”, “smart-stupid”, “drunkard-teetotaler”. By attributing certain poles of constructs to objects, forecasting is carried out. On the basis of this theory, the Repertoire Test of Role Constructs was created.

Kelly George Alexander - American psychologist, author of personality construct theory. Within the framework of this theory, each person is considered as a kind of researcher who builds an image of the world around him using certain categorical scales, or “personal constructors”, peculiar to him. Based on this image of the world, hypotheses about events are put forward, and certain actions are planned and implemented. To study these constructs, the “repertory grid” method was developed.

Biography of George Kelly

Kelly was born in a farming community near Wichita, Kansas. At first he studied in a rural school, where there was only one classroom. Later, his parents sent him to Unchita, where he attended four high schools for 4 years. Kelly's parents were very religious, hardworking, and did not tolerate drinking, playing cards, or dancing. The traditions and spirit of the Midwest were deeply revered in his family, and Kelly was an adored only child.

Kelly attended Friends University for three years and then Park College for one year, where he received a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics in 1926. He initially considered a career as a mechanical engineer, but, partly influenced by inter-university discussions, turned to social problems. Kelly recalled that his first psychology course was boring and unconvincing. The lecturer spent a lot of time discussing learning theories, but Kelly was not interested.

After college, Kelly attended the University of Kansas, studying educational sociology and labor relations. He wrote a dissertation based on a study of leisure time practices among Kansas City workers and received a master's degree in 1928. He then moved to Minneapolis, where he taught a language development class for the American Bankers Association and an Americanization class for future American citizens. He then worked at a junior college in Sheldon, Iowa, where he met his future wife, Gladys Thompson, a teacher at the same school. They married in 1931.

In 1929, Kelly began his scientific work at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. There in 1930 he received a bachelor's degree in education. Under the guidance of Sir Godfrey Thomson, an eminent statistician and educator, he wrote a dissertation on the problems of predicting success in teaching. That same year, he returned to the United States at Iowa State University as a candidate for a doctorate in psychology. In 1931, Kelly received his doctorate. His dissertation examined common factors in speech and reading disorders.

Kelly began his academic career as a professor of physiological psychology at Fort Hay College, Kansas. Then, in the middle of the Great Depression, he decided that he should "do something other than teach physiological psychology." He became involved in clinical psychology without any formal training in emotional problems. During his 13-year stay at Fort Hays (1931-1943), Kelly developed a program of mobile psychological clinics in Kansas. He and his students traveled a lot, providing the necessary psychological assistance in the public school system. From this experience, numerous ideas were born that were later incorporated into his theoretical formulations. During this period, Kelly moved away from the Freudian approach to therapy. His clinical experience suggested that people in the Midwest suffered more from prolonged drought, dust storms, and economic hardships than from libidinal strength.

During World War II, Kelly, as a Naval Aviation psychologist, led a program to train local civilian pilots. He also worked in the aviation branch of the Bureau of Medicine and Naval Surgery, where he remained until 1945. This year he was appointed assistant professor at the University of Maryland.

After the end of the war, there was a significant need for clinical psychologists, as many American military personnel returning home had a variety of psychological problems. Indeed, the Second World War was an important factor influencing the development of clinical psychology as an integral part of health science. Kelly became a prominent figure in this field. In 1946, he entered the national field of psychology when he became professor and director of the department of clinical psychology at The Ohio State University. During his 20 years here, Kelly completed and published his theory of personality. He also conducted a clinical psychology program for the top graduates of higher education institutions in the United States.

In 1965, Kelly began working at Brandeis University, where he was appointed to the Department of Behavioral Sciences. This post (a professor's dream come true) gave him greater freedom to continue his own scientific research. He died in 1967 at the age of 62. Until his death, Kelly was compiling a book from the countless reports he had given over the previous decade. A revised version of this work was published posthumously in 1969, edited by Brendan Maher.

In addition to the fact that Kelly was an outstanding teacher, scientist, and theorist, he held key positions in American psychology. He was president of two divisions—clinical and counseling—of the American Psychological Association. He has also lectured extensively in the United States and abroad. In the last years of his life, Kelly paid great attention to the possible application of his theory of personality constructs in resolving various international problems.

Kelly's most famous scientific work is the two-volume work “The Psychology of Personal Constructs” (1955). It describes his theoretical formulations of the concept of personality and their clinical applications. For students wishing to become familiar with other aspects of Kelly's work, the following books are recommended: New Directions in Personality Construct Theory, Personality Construct Psychology, and The Development of Personality Construct Psychology.

Introduction

Personality construct theory is an approach to understanding people by attempting to enter their inner world and imagine what that world might look like to them from their best vantage point. Thus, if you disagree with another person, George Kelly might suggest that you stop arguing for a moment and inform your opponent that you are willing to present the controversial issue from his point of view and in his favor if he agrees to do the same according to towards you. This will allow you to establish a deeply subjective and personal relationship with the other person and provide both of you with the opportunity to understand each other on a deeper level, even if you do not reach a quick resolution to the dispute or find a basis for agreement. The terms you use to understand each other or to describe yourself and your position are called personality constructs or personality constructs; these constructs are formed on the basis of your own personal meanings, as well as the meanings you have acquired as a result of interaction with your social environment. The bulk of this chapter will be devoted to describing how we can understand our own personality constructs, as well as the personality constructs of others, and how personality construct systems function.

Rather than enumerate a set of basic needs or define the specific content that makes up our personality, personality construct theory allows each person to imagine the specific content of his life and relies on theoretical assumptions only to describe different ways of understanding how this specific content comes to be. form. Many texts describing personality construct theory rely heavily on Kelly's (1955) metaphor of the “man-scientist” (or “individual-scientist”) to explain how Kelly described the form of personality constructs. According to this metaphor, people are described as scientists who formulate hypotheses about the world in the form of personal constructs and then test their assumptions in practice, much in the same way; as would a scientist who strives to accurately predict and, if possible, control events. Perhaps, by using this metaphor, Kelly was trying to express his thoughts in a form consonant with his more cognitively and behaviorally oriented colleagues. Hinkle (1970, p. 91) quotes Kelly's reflections on the state of psychology of his day: “American psychologists are a rather pitiful sight, just imagine how cut off they are from understanding the miracle that is man, and from the truth of human relationships! By developing personality construct theory, I hoped that I could find a way to help them discover people while maintaining their reputation as scientists.”

By using this metaphor, Kelly was trying to point out not only that ordinary people are like scientists, but also that scientists are people too. However, although this metaphor helps to describe some important aspects of Kelly's theory, it does not convey the essence of his theory, which Kelly was able to do in his later work. Moreover, Kelly admits that if he had to do all his work over again, he would present his theory in more explicit language. He even actually began to implement this plan in his unfinished book “Human Feelings” ( The Human Feeling), (Fransella, 1995, p. 16). Some completed chapters of this book were published after his death in the Kelly Collection, edited by Maher (Maher, 1969). The excessive emphasis on the metaphor of the “man-scientist” when presenting Kelly’s theory by other authors has led to the fact that in a number of psychology textbooks this theory began to be classified as cognitivist or as a theory that builds a bridge between the cognitivist and humanistic approaches. However, in this book we will defend the view that the essence of his teachings largely belongs to the circle of humanistic theories of Rogers, Maslow, and several other authors (Epting & Leitner, 1994; Leitner & Epting, in press). In fact, he was one of the key figures at the Old Saybrook Conference, which launched American humanistic psychology (Taylor, 2000). However, Kelly was the author of a completely different type of humanistic theory, which emphasizes the process of self-creation (Butt, Burr, & Epting, 1997), in contrast to Maslow's theory, which proposed a hierarchy of specific needs, suggesting that the main role belongs to the process of self-discovery (Maslow, 1987 ). In addition, Kelly tried to develop specific operations that provided visual confirmation of his theoretical concepts.

Kelly laid a strong humanistic foundation for his work, taking as its central premise that human beings are capable of constant self-creation. For Kelly, reality is inherently flexible; there is room for exploration, creativity and renewal. Essentially, personality construct theory is the psychology of understanding an individual's perspective—an understanding that can help him decide what choices are best for him given his current state of affairs. Because people construct meaning in their lives from the earliest stages of individual development, they often do not later realize that there are many ways to change themselves and the way they relate to the world. Reality is not as immutable as we tend to believe, if only we can find ways to bring a little freedom into it. People can reconstruct (reinterpret, reconstrue) reality. We are not at all forced to accept the color of the corner into which their lives are driven, and this discovery often brings a feeling of freedom. Kelly offers a view of man as being in a constant process of change, and according to which the root of all problems is the obstacle to changing oneself. Thus, Kelly created a truly humanistic theory of action, which aims to open up a constantly changing world for man, presenting him with both difficulties to overcome and opportunities for growth.

Biographical excursion

George Alexander Kelly, the only child in the family, was born on April 28, 1905 on a farm near the small town of Perth, Kansas, located south of Wichita. Kelly's father and mother were well-educated people whose knowledge of the world around them went far beyond their provincial life (Francella 1995, 5). His mother, born on the island of Barbados in Western India, was the daughter of a sea captain - an adventurer who repeatedly moved with her family to different parts of the world. Kelly's father was trained as a Presbyterian minister, but after his marriage he abandoned his mission and settled on a farm in Kansas.

Kelly's primary education was a combination of schooling and home schooling during periods when there was no functioning school nearby. From the age of 13, Kelly lived most of the time away from home, changing four schools, none of which he received a certificate of completion. In 1925, after three years at Friends University, he was transferred to Park College in Parkville, Missouri, where he received a bachelor's degree. Kelly decided to major in physics and mathematics, which included a career in engineering. During this period, however, Kelly became passionate about social issues and enrolled in a doctoral program in educational psychology at Kansas State University. In 1927, even before defending his dissertation, he began looking for work as a psychology teacher.

Unable to find any vacancies, he moved to Minneapolis, where he found three places in night schools: one at the American Bankers Association, another in a public speaking class for managers, and the third in an Americanization class for individuals preparing to become US citizens. He enrolled in a full-time program in sociology and biometrics at the University of Minnesota, but, unable to pay the tuition, was forced to drop out. Despite this, at the age of 22 he still managed to defend his doctoral dissertation on the topic “A Thousand Workers and Their Free Time.” In the winter of 1927-1928, he finally found a position as a teacher of psychology and public speaking, as well as director of the drama club at Sheldon Junior College in Sheldon, Iowa. In 1929, Kelly applied for participation in the international exchange program and received the right to train at the University of Edinburgh. In Scotland he is completing a Bachelor of Education degree program with a thesis on predicting the success of teaching candidates. Upon returning to the United States, Kelly enrolled in her first psychology program at the University of Iowa. Nine months later he receives his Ph.D.

Two days after the defense, Kelly's wedding to Gladys Thompson took place. Kelly managed to get a position as an assistant professor of psychology at Fort Hay State University, Kansas, where he spent the next 12 months.

Kelly's first publications were devoted primarily to practical applications of psychology to the school system and the treatment of various groups of clinical patients. He was extremely concerned about the practical use of psychological knowledge. Experience teaching psychology and public speaking, as well as running a drama club, led Kelly to question the legitimacy of using Freudian interpretations, and showed him that there were many other plausible interpretations that could be applied with equal success in these areas of activity. Realizing this, Kelly begins his experiments on the therapeutic use of role-playing games. During this period, he wrote an unpublished textbook on psychology, “Understandable Psychology” ( Understandable Psychology), and later - “Clinical Practice Guidelines” ( Handbook of Clinical Practice, Kelly, 1936 ); work on these books contributed to the formation of his concept of the psychology of action.

As the world began to prepare for war, Kelly was appointed head of the university pilot training program established by the Civil Aeronautis Administration. Kelly even went through his own flight training program. In 1943, he was assigned to the US Navy Reserve and served in Washington, DC, with the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. After the war, Kelly took a position as an associate professor at the University of Maryland. The following year, he was appointed professor and director of clinical psychology at Ohio State University; Columbus, Ohio. He continued to hold this position for twenty years and while in this position he published his major works.

At the age of 50, Kelly published his major two-volume work - The Psychology of Personal Constructs - Volume One: A Theory of Personality ; Volume Two: Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy; Kelly, 1955). He devoted his free time to seeing clients for free, writing theoretical papers, sending commissioned articles around the world explaining and developing his theory, and developing professional applications of clinical psychology. Kelly served as President of the Divisions of Clinical Psychology and Counseling Psychology of the American Psychological Association and President of the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology. In 1965, he accepted a position at Brandeis University, but in early March he went to the hospital for fairly routine surgery. Unexpectedly, he suffered a complication and soon died.

Ideological predecessors

Pragmatism and John Dewey

The philosophy of pragmatism and the psychology of John Diyu were the source that had the most significant influence on the development of the theory of personal constructs. First of all, this concerns the early stages of development of this theory. In Kelly's own words (1955, p. 154), “Dewey, whose philosophical and psychological ideas can be easily discerned between the lines of his works on the psychology of personality constructs, conceived of the universe as an unfinished plot, the development of which man must anticipate and understand.”

The origins of pragmatism, which is considered the only original contribution of the American continent to world philosophy, are associated with an interest in the practical significance of things. Central to pragmatism is the question of how useful the idea under consideration is for realizing some practical goal.

Significantly influenced by William James and Charles Peirce, Dewey tried to apply his ideas to children's education, seeking to ensure that children could see practical applications of the knowledge they acquired in school. It is not difficult to trace the direct connection of this desire with Kelly’s intention to create a psychology of action and the practical use of psychological knowledge. Two authors - John Novak (1983) and Bill Warren (1998) - have attempted to trace in detail this connection between Kelly's work and Dewey's philosophy and to highlight their similarity in views of human experience as anticipatory in nature; on human curiosity as an experiment conducted with the surrounding world; and in emphasizing the role of hypothetical thinking in viewing reality from a scientific point of view.

Existential-phenomenological psychology

Butt (1997) and Holland (1970) have been able to provide compelling evidence for the view that personality construct theory is a subset of existential phenomenology, despite Kelly's protestations that his theory cannot be considered part of any or another approach. Unlike Rogers and Maslow, Kelly rejected the terminology used by the existentialists, but he was quite clear that he accepted their principles. Butt (1997, p. 21) argues that Kelly arrived at the existentialist position through his full embrace of pragmatism. For example, Kelly openly states that existence precedes essence. For Sartre (1995, pp. 35-36) this statement was the defining feature of existentialism: “This means that man first of all exists, arises, appears on the stage, and only then defines himself. And if man, as the existentialist perceives him, cannot be defined, it is because in the beginning he is nothing. And only later will he represent anything, since he himself will make himself what he will become.” This principle is directly reflected in Kelly's emphasis on the role of self-creation as a process and in his refusal to base his theory on any psychological content; a certain set of drives, stages of development or inevitable conflicts.

Korzybski and Moreno

Kelly owes much to the semantic theory of Alfred Korzybski and the work of Jacob Moreno, who was the founder of psychodrama as a therapeutic method. Kelly (1955, p. 260) explicitly points to the priority of these authors in setting out his own method of fixed role therapy. Kelly was inspired by Korzybski's classic rejection of the laws of Aristotle's logic in his Science and Sanity (1933), and by his contention that people could benefit greatly from trying to help them change the designations and names that they use imagining objects in the outside world rather than trying to change the outside world directly. For Korzybski (1933, 1943), “Suffering and unhappiness result from a mismatch of relations between something belonging to the external world and its semantic, linguistic referents in the human mind” (Stewart & Barry, 1991). Kelly took these ideas and combined them with Moreno's (1923, 1937) idea that people could be helped by asking them to take part in a play describing their own lives; in this case, the director distributes roles, which the participants then perform on a professional stage. Kelly was most deeply impressed by Moreno's use of spontaneous improvisation and self-presentation. Kelly's idea was to invite people to act out a role that was new to them, so that they could see the world in a new way, thereby opening up the possibility of some bold new action.

According to Kelly: “People change things by first changing themselves, and achieve their goals, if they succeed, only at the cost of self-change, which brings suffering to some people and salvation to others” (Kelly, 1970, p. 16). .

Basic Concepts

[Material in this section adapted from Epting, 1984, p. 23-54.]

Constructive alternativeism: a philosophical position

The theory of personality constructs is based on the proposition that for a theory of personality or psychotherapeutic theory it is extremely important to clearly formulate the philosophical foundations on which it is built. For personality construct theory, this philosophical basis was a position known as constructive alternativeism, summarized by Kelly as follows:

“Like other theories, the psychology of personality constructs is a consequence of a certain philosophical position. In this case, the principle is taken as the basis according to which, regardless of what the nature of things is, or how the search for truth ends, the events that we encounter today can be interpreted using as many constructions as our imagination allows us to conceive. intelligence. This does not mean that one design is as good as another, nor does it exclude the possibility that at some infinitely distant point in time humanity will be able to see reality to the very extreme limits of its existence. However, this point reminds us that at the moment all our ideas are open to doubt and revision and generally suggests that even the most obvious events of everyday life can appear to us in a completely different light, if only we are inventive enough to construct (interpret) ) them differently." (Kelly, 1970a, p. 1)

“What distinguishes a psychologist from other people? He's experimenting. Who doesn't? He seeks answers to his questions in practical life. But aren't we all doing this? His search raises more questions than answers: But has it ever been different for anyone?” (Kelly, 1969a, p. 15)

“[We] do not see the need to have a closet full of motives in order to explain the fact that a person is active and not inert; nor do we have any reason to believe that man is inherently inert... The result: no list of motives to clutter our system, and, we hope, a much more coherent psychological theory, the subject of which is the living man" (Kelly, 1969b , p. 89).

Although there is a real world external to our experience of the world, we as individuals experience this world by imposing our interpretations on it. The world does not reveal itself to us directly and automatically. We must establish a certain relationship with him. It is only through the relationships we form with the world that we gain the knowledge that allows us to develop. We are responsible for what knowledge we gain about the world in which we live. Kelly characterized this aspect of his philosophical framework as a position of epistemic responsibility (Kelly, 1966b). Another reason for accepting this active approach to knowledge advocated by Kelly was the fact that for Kelly the world itself is “in process.” The world is constantly changing, so an adequate understanding of the world requires constant reinterpretation. Knowledge about the world cannot be collected, stored and supplemented like the connection of strong and solid building blocks. Adequate understanding requires constant change.

The theory of personal constructs also makes a complementary statement that knowledge about the world is unified. It is assumed that someday we will know the true state of affairs. At some point in the distant future, it will become clear to us which concept of the world we must accept, which concept is veridical. At present, however, a much more effective strategy is to use several different interpretations (constructive alternatives) so that we can see the clear benefits of each. It also suggests that some benefits can only be seen over an extended period of time, rather than looking at a person from moment to moment or within a single situation.

System of personal constructs: basic provisions

In this section we will consider the proposition that Kelly called the fundamental postulate, as well as two of the eleven corollaries that can be considered as consequences of this postulate. The material is presented as a single block, since it contains the defining features of the basic system of constructs, and is the basis on which the entire theory is built. In order to understand human nature from the proposed point of view, it is necessary to begin with these provisions as describing what is “given” to us. This basic material is laid out by Kelly as follows:

“Fundamental postulate. A person's activities are psychologically channeled according to how he anticipates events” (Kelly, 1955, p. 46).

“Constructive corollary. Man anticipates events by constructing copies of them” (p. 50).

“Dichotomous corollary. The human constructive system consists of a limited number of dichotomous constructs” (p. 59).

These theoretical provisions contain information about what a person is and how we should approach understanding a person. First, man must be considered as an organized whole. Consequently, a person cannot be studied by considering his individual functions, such as memory, thinking, perception, emotions, sensations, learning, etc.; a person also cannot be considered only as part of a social group. Instead, man must be recognized as having a legitimate right to be the central subject of inquiry, an individual worthy of understanding from his own point of view. The element of analysis in this case is a personal construct, and a person should be approached as a psychological structure, which is a system of personal constructs. Using a personality construct system, the clinician views the individual according to the dimensions of meaning that the individual places on the world, so that the world can be interpreted. The therapist is primarily interested in the meaning system that an individual uses to understand interpersonal relationships - how the individual views his relationships with parents, husband or wife, friends, neighbors, employers, etc. In other words, this approach can be characterized by pointing out that that the main subject of attention should be the individual’s own view of the world and, above all, the sphere of interpersonal relationships.

The principle of understanding an individual's view of the world should be seen as relevant not only to the client, but also to the professional psychologist. Personality construct theory was developed as a reflective theory. The approach to understanding the client can also be applied to understanding the therapist as he develops his understanding of the client. The explanation used for the client must also be used for the person offering the explanation. This point is discussed in more detail in the work of Oliver and Landfield (1962).

The functioning mechanisms of such constructs and systems of constructs are also described in a specific way. The emphasis is on the procedural nature of human psychological life. The individual is seen as continuously changing in one direction or another. In addition, this movement is regular in nature - it forms patterns and fits into a certain direction.

The individual process of change is always limited within certain limits. The system of constructs of a particular individual in a particular period of time is described by certain parameters. The individual is seen not simply as taking the form of some vague, nebulous formation of constructive dimensions, but as an imaginative but limited system of constructs. At any given point in time, an individual can be understood as a system of more or less definite dimensions. However, this does not necessarily say anything about what a given individual is capable of becoming in the future. Some individuals may develop a very multifaceted and unusual personality system.

It goes without saying that structural systems are future-oriented. The individual is seen as anticipating what will happen next. It takes into account events that have taken place previously and uses the present moment as a basis for predicting what will happen in an instant, a day or a year. A person tries to recognize familiar features in new events, using his past experience and at the same time imparting to these events new qualities that, from his point of view, they should have. This process involves anticipation of events, in which a prediction is made based on what the actual state of affairs is at the moment and what development of events is desirable. This process is described as "copy construction". A person listens to which motives are recurring and uses his perceptions to increasingly comprehend the nature of the world around him as he moves into the future.

Consider, for example, a particular woman, Ann, according to our theory, who has semantic dimensions (personality constructs) that she uses to understand other people she knows and her relationships with them. In particular, she is aware (at some level) of how she feels about the men in her life, and how she currently thinks and feels about them. Let's assume that for the most part she perceives men as having very definite opinions about everything. Sometimes this gives her a feeling of confidence, but at other times it can bother her and even irritate her. Then she meets a new friend, Anthony. Anthony, as a man, also exhibits behaviors that are so familiar to her, so she expects him to be a man who has his own definite opinion about everything. Such personal constructs are not simply ways of describing; they are predictions of how events are likely to unfold in the future. However, in this case, Anthony does not come across as a person who structures his life according to his own opinions. This doesn't mean he doesn't have an opinion, it's just that he uses his opinions very differently than the other men in her life. Ann understands that a specific copy must be designed for such an occasion. At this point, Anne may simply regard Anthony as a typical man, but one who in some respects cannot be treated the same as a carbon copy of everyone else. It is from such material that new constructs are formed. Perhaps Anne is beginning to realize that Anthony has values ​​too, he just doesn't need to express those values ​​in the form of dogmatic opinions.

Another example that illustrates the simple application of an already existing constructive dimension is that of John, who began to notice traits in his friend that he had not previously noticed. John may say to himself: Something about him puts me in the same state of mind that I experienced in the presence of my sister. Yes, it reminds me of the compassion and affection that she showed me. He then begins to look (only to a certain extent consciously) for examples of people demonstrating qualities opposite to those exhibited by his sister, and this places restrictions on the corresponding dimension of the construct as a whole and gives it a narrower and more specific meaning. John can tell that this sympathetic note contrasts with the indifferent and uncaring attitude of his uncle, who always seemed to be interested in people only for their intellect. This contrast, which defines the constructive dimension, is used to highlight the full range of elements (other people) in a person's life, some of which are located near the pole of similarity, and some of which are located at the opposite end of the spectrum. Such structural measurements are used not as a storage of elements, but as a tool for their localization, like the legs of a compass, indicating only the relative position of two elements - their relative position in relation to each other. It is in the sympathy shown by John's friend that he is similar to his sister, and on the other hand, his difference from his uncle. Perhaps, under different circumstances and in the company of other people, the same uncle will show genuine compassion towards these other people whom he has just met.

Such constructive dimensions are bipolar (have two poles and are dichotomous); that is to say, they do not represent an infinite and continuous spectrum of gradations of the same quality. The relationship between both poles is one of contrast: one pole is opposite to the other. However, understanding the dichotomous nature of constructs is not easy. It is assumed that any psychological dimensions that we perceive as a continuum of a certain quality can also be imagined in a polarized dichotomous form. However, a significant proportion of research uses construct measures in a continuum form (Bannister & Mair, 1968; Epting, 1972; Fransella & Bannister, 1977).

For thought. Identifying constructs

Try to identify your own personality constructs using the following items from the repertory test, taken from Kelly (1955, pp. 158-159):

Step 1.

Write one name next to each item; make sure that names are not repeated.

1. Your mother or the person who acts most motherly towards you.

2. Your father or the person who acts most like a father to you.

3. Your closest brother or the person who behaves most like a brother towards you.

4. Your closest sister or the person who acts the most sisterly towards you.

5. A teacher you liked, or a teacher of a subject you liked.

6. A teacher you didn't like, or a teacher in a subject you didn't like.

7. Your closest boyfriend/girlfriend, immediately preceding your current boyfriend/girlfriend.

8. A significant other person at the moment or your closest current friend.

9. The employer, instructor, or boss you were under during your most stressful time.

10. A person you are closely involved with who probably doesn't like you.

11. A person you have met within the last six months that you would like to get to know better.

12. The person you would most like to help or feel sorry for.

13. The most highly intelligent person you know personally.

14. The most successful person you know personally.

15. The most interesting person you know personally.

Step 2.

The sets of three numbers listed in the Step 1 Triads column in the sorting table below correspond to the people you listed as numbers 1 through 15 in Step 1.

As you complete each of the 15 sorts, consider the three people you named in step 1. How are two of these three people similar, and how are they significantly different from the third? Having determined what the similarities between two people are, enter this characteristic in the “Construct” column. Then circle the names of people who are similar to each other. Finally, write down the way the third person differs from the other two in the “Contrast” column.

Your answers in the construct-contrast columns for each sort constitute your personal construct!

Processes and functions of construct systems

Although each collaria contains its own motivational components, the two collarias discussed in this section are central to the theme of motivation. Despite the fact that structural systems have a certain form (structure), they are in a process of continuous change. This process is directly built into the structure of the constructs. At the same time, we should not assume that matter, which has a motionless structure, is impregnated with certain motivational forces or psychic energy from the outside. Kelly was opposed to the traditional concept of motivation, which assumes that some static structure is either pushed forward or pulled along by external forces.

Instead, the individual must be understood in the context of his own personal constructs, which are constantly in flux. At the same time, both the individual himself and his environment are constantly moving and changing. If we consider the individual to be constantly "in process", an important psychological question becomes to determine in which direction he is moving. The corresponding “motivational” corollaries are formulated as follows.

“Corollary of choice. In a polarized construct, a person chooses for himself the alternative that he expects will contribute to the expansion and greater certainty of his system” (Kelly, 1955, p. 64).

“Corollary of experience. A person’s constructive system changes as he successively constructs copies of events” (p. 72).

“Ultimately, the measure of freedom and dependence for a person is the level at which he forms his beliefs. The man who organizes his life in accordance with numerous strictly established and unchangeable beliefs concerning particular matters makes himself a victim of circumstances” (Kelly, 1955, p. 16).

Since the choice corollary is traditionally seen as the central tenet of personality construct theory regarding motivation, it is where we begin our discussion of this topic. The main subject of the corollary of choice is the direction of individual movement. This corollary is formulated in terms of the choices that human experience contains. According to this theory, the individual is always forced to make choices, but these choices are seen as orderly, understandable and predictable, if the individual's point of view is taken into account. The choices that exist for the individual are located between the poles of the constructs. For example, in a relationship with a certain person, an adequate dimension may be “sensitivity to feelings,” which in bipolar form can be formulated as “receptive” - “unresponsive to the feelings of others.” Let us further assume that these two poles are captured by a higher-order construct: “voice of the heart” versus “power of the intellect.”

This means that the choice is made in the direction that, from the individual's point of view, leads to the deepest understanding of the world around him at the moment. Movement in this direction can lead to either the most complete (expansion) or the most detailed (certainty) understanding of the issue. The choice is made in the direction that the individual considers as the most favorable opportunity for the growth and development of his constructive system as a whole. The direction of movement of the system is determined by this guiding principle. This understanding has nothing to do with the assertion that a person's choice is guided by the hedonic principle of obtaining pleasure or avoiding pain, or even with the assertion that the choice is based on whether the original hypothesis is confirmed or refuted. However, personality construct theory recognizes some distinct advantages of the concept of confirming or disconfirming hypotheses when considering other issues, and we will return to this point when discussing the corollary of experience.

Returning to our example, let’s say that our client chose the “voice of the heart” pole in the construct: “voice of the heart” versus “power of the intellect.” Thus, the client demonstrated to us that his most favorable opportunities can be realized in this direction. In this case, the client can explain his choice by saying that he needs to develop something related to human values, and not the ability to reason logically. If the client has made such a decision, the dichotomy of “susceptibility” or “immunity” to the feelings of others becomes relevant for him. In this case, the client chooses the "immunity" alternative because it represents the greatest opportunity for him to understand other people at the moment. Perhaps the other person just humiliated the other person with a witty response. Therefore, at this moment, the choice made makes it possible to better understand the other person.

In this corollary, only the fact of choice is considered. Of course, this choice is structured by a particular dimension of the construct present in a given person, and the final decision corresponds to a point located between the two poles of this construct dimension. This does not necessarily mean that each of these choices is made completely consciously. The choice process is determined by the possible consequences that the individual sees before him. Kelly argues that this principle applies even to cases of voluntary death. An example of suicide that supports this view is Socrates' acceptance of the death sentence (Kelly, 1961). The choice before him forced him either to renounce his entire teaching, or to drink the cup of hemlock and end his physical existence. Socrates chose hemlock to have the opportunity to prolong his real life, his teaching. So, the choice is made in the direction in which the individual sees the most opportunities for himself. This statement is evidence that by its nature this theory is deeply psychological in nature. This choice is a decision that is the first step towards ensuring that the individual has the opportunity to exert his or her influence on the world around him. This idea is reflected in the following statement: “... a person makes decisions that primarily concern himself, and only then other objects - and then only on the condition that he takes some effective action... People change things by changing themselves first, and achieve their goals, if they succeed, only by paying for it through self-change, which brings suffering to some people and salvation to others. People make choices by choosing from their own actions, and the alternatives they consider are determined by their own constructs. However, the results of these elections may range from no result to disaster on the one hand, to general prosperity on the other" (Kelly, 1969b, p. 16).

Another important motivational aspect of personality construct theory is expressed in the corollary of experience. It describes a person as a being in active contact with the world. The emphasis is not on the nature of the events themselves, but on the individual's active interpretation of those events. Life events, according to Kelly, are inevitably ordered in a temporal dimension. The individual's task is to find recurring themes in the flow of new events. At first, new events are perceived only in the most general terms. They are then searched for similarities with other known events, so that a recurring theme can be identified, which in turn can be contrasted with other events. Here we observe the emergence of a new construct, which becomes possible thanks to a person’s ability to improve the system of his life. An individual uses knowledge with the help of which he tries to explain something new to himself. This wandering in uncertainty is a characteristic feature of personality construct theory, which is a theory of the unknown (Kelly, 1977).

The central subject of corollary experience is the fact that a person is faced with the need to confirm or refute his constructive system. The main idea of ​​this thesis is that “confirmation can lead to reconstruction no less than refutation, and perhaps even more so. Confirmation serves as a fulcrum for the individual in certain areas of his life, giving him the freedom to embark on risky explorations of related areas, as does, for example, a child who, feeling confident in his own home, decides to be the first to explore the territory of his neighbor's yard... Sequence Such investments and withdrawals constitute human experience” (Kelly, 1969b, p. 18).

Experience as a whole is viewed as a cycle consisting of five stages: anticipation, investment, encounter, confirmation or refutation, and constructive revision. This sequence will be discussed in detail below, as we use it as a model for describing psychotherapeutic practice in the next section of the book. For now, it will suffice to simply point out the fact that a person must first foresee events and then invest his personal resources in order to further develop the system. Once such an investment has been made, the individual faces subsequent events having already made some commitment to their outcome. At this stage, the individual is open to confirmation or refutation of his expectations, so that constructive revision becomes possible for him. Interruption of this full cycle of experience deprives the individual of the opportunity to live a more fulfilling life, enriched by the introduction of genuine variability into his constructive system. Kelly gives the example of a school administrator whose 13 years of experience amounted to the fact that this unfortunate person actually acquired the experience of one school year, repeated 13 times.

Individual differences and interpersonal relationships

This section of the basic theory is devoted to the nature of the relationships that exist between people. The nature of the social process must be considered from the point of view of how a person acquires a truly psychological understanding of social relations. Personality construct theory approaches the study of social issues from the perspective of an individual's own unique system of personal constructs. The corollaries devoted to this topic are formulated as follows:

“Corollary of individuality. People differ from each other in their construction of events (Kelly, 1955, p. 55).

Community corollary. The psychological processes of one person are similar to those of another to the extent that he uses a construct of experience similar to the construct used by that other person” (Kelly, 1966b, p. 20).

“Corollary of Sociality. One person can participate in a social process affecting another person to the extent that he constructs (recreates) the construction processes of that person” (Kelly, 1955, p. 95).

Beginning with the corollary of individuality, all subsequent corollaries contain the idea that each person has some aspects of his constructive system that distinguishes it from the constructive systems of all other people. In addition to differences among people in terms of the content of their construct dimensions, people also differ in the ways they combine their personality constructs into systems. This point is of particular importance to the therapist, who must approach each client as a unique individual. And although one person may be similar to another in some ways, there are aspects of each personality that must be handled as required by its unique constructive content and organization. This forces the therapist to be prepared to form new constructs of his own when working with each new client.

The scientific literature has drawn a parallel between the work of a therapist and the unique work of a meteorologist, who must understand the general principles of climate systems but also focus on phenomena such as a single hurricane being named and tracked as a single system. Similar ideas were reflected in the works of Gordon Allport (Allport, 1962) on the morphogenetic analysis of a particular individual. The Personality Corollary states that part of personality construct theory is devoted to the study of how an individual structures his or her life.

The contrast to the corollary of individuality is the collary of community, emphasizing the psychological similarities between people. As one might imagine, this commonality is explained by the similarity of certain aspects of the structural systems themselves, and not by the similarity of the circumstances with which people have to deal. This corollary suggests that two people's life circumstances may be very similar, but their interpretation of these circumstances may be completely different if we consider two people who are completely different from each other from a psychological point of view. On the other hand, two people may encounter completely different external events but interpret them in the same way due to their psychological similarities.

It should also be pointed out that the scope of the thesis about the commonality of people extends beyond the mere constructive similarity between them. For two people to be considered psychologically similar, they must not only be able to make similar predictions on the basis of similar construct dimensions, but also form their predictions in similar ways. According to Kelly, “we are interested not only in the similarity of people's predictions, but also in the similarity of the ways in which they arrive at their predictions” (Kelly, 1955, p. 94). Since this corollary emphasizes the similarity of the construction of experience, and not the similarity of external events, for Kelly the principle of psychological similarity can be formulated in another way: “I have tried to show clearly that the construction must cover the experience itself, as well as the surrounding events with which this experience is connected on the external level. At the end of a cycle of experience, a person has a revised construction of the events that he originally tried to anticipate, as well as a construction of the process by which he comes to new conclusions concerning these events. When considering a new endeavor, whatever it may be, a person is likely to take into account the effectiveness of the experience acquisition procedures he has previously used” (Kelly, 1969b, p. 21).

People's final conclusions about what kinds of events happen to them, what these events mean in their lives, and what questions they force them to ask next should be similar. Psychological similarity is the similarity of those mechanisms that move people through life from the present to the future. It is very important to realize the nature of this similarity, since on the basis of this similarity one can come to completely different conclusions than on the basis of an analysis of only those situations in which a person found himself in the past. Perhaps the best illustration of this fact is the psychological similarity of two people belonging to completely different cultures. The people of Bali, Chad, Russia, and the United States may be very similar to each other in that they structure their very different experiences in exactly the same or even the same way. The emphasis is on the ways in which the individual structures his experience. According to Kelly, "...the similarity of the psychological processes of two people is determined by the similarity of their constructions of their personal experiences, as well as the similarity of the conclusions they draw about external events." (Kelly, 1969b, p. 21). The fact that people can reach the same conclusions by moving along different paths within their constructive systems is irrelevant. All that matters is that they develop the same attitude towards the means by which they arrive at their conclusions, and also that their conclusions are consistent with each other in themselves.

We will conclude our discussion of the basic theory with an analysis of the corollary of sociality. This corollary is transitional from the theme of community to the theme of interpersonal relationships, types of relationships between people. There are two opposing orientations in the theory of personality constructs. On the one hand, the basis of the relationships that we establish with other people is a person’s ability to predict, and to a certain extent, control their relationships with others. In this case, a person is guided by the desire to accurately predict the patterns of behavior that another person will demonstrate. This kind of orientation is seen as extremely limiting to human experience. It plays an important role only in those cases when the other interests us not as an “individual”, as exclusively as a machine that can behave in a certain way. In some situations, such as in a large shopping center, this orientation may be appropriate. When entering a supermarket, a person pays attention to other people only to the extent that allows him to understand the general direction of human flows, and not be knocked down by the oncoming wave of buyers. Thus, in certain cases, people are best viewed as behavioral machines - at a level sufficient for our predictions and control capabilities to provide insight into the situation.

On the other hand, in interpersonal relationships there are qualities that do not fit into the framework of a purely behaviorist orientation, and force us to consider the other person as a full-fledged personality with all the richness of its manifestations. In the corollary of sociality, this process is described as the establishment of a role relationship with another person, which requires us to be able to construct the behavior of another person and try to construct the ways in which this person experiences the world around him. The corollary of sociality focuses on the process by which one person constructs another person's construction process. One person tries to incorporate the construction processes of another into his own. With this interpersonal orientation, we interact with others based on our understanding of what the other person is like “as a person.”

However, this does not mean that, having understood another person, we automatically begin to agree with him. We may even decide to confront what we see in another person, but this confrontation is based on relationships that we call role interpersonal relationships. We are confronted not by a behavioral machine, but by another person, to whom we endow with an individuality similar in one way or another to our own, although perhaps quite different in many others. According to Kelly's theory, such role relationships give rise to more compassionate attitudes towards other people, including those with whom we oppose. This understanding allows us to give a purely psychological definition of the term role. A person’s role is determined by the nature of a person’s psychological activity, activity aimed at accepting and understanding the point of view of another.

This corollary is of great importance for a psychotherapist, since the cornerstone in building a psychotherapeutic relationship is role-playing relationships. In order for the therapist to be effective, he must be able to establish a role relationship with the client. The consultant must therefore base his understanding of the client on the understanding resulting from his attempts to incorporate the client's construction processes into his own. It should be added that the client must provide a reciprocal service to the therapist and, in parallel, construct the therapist's constructions. The construction process of one person does not interfere with the construction process of another.

Transitional constructs

Transitional constructs are a group of constructs of interest to professional psychotherapists and are associated with processes specifically aimed at controlling changes occurring in constructive systems. Transitional constructs consider a person in the process of change. In this case, the main subject of attention is everything about which people experience intense feelings. These experiences are similar to those people experience when they feel they are living their most fulfilling lives or when significant changes occur in their lives. Human emotions are considered as special transitional states of a system of personal constructs.

The conditions that such constructs are designed to control include, first of all, anxiety, which is one of the main subjects of attention when analyzing any psychological problems. In the theory of personality constructs, anxiety is viewed as a transitional state. This term refers to the process of a person undergoing deep transformations - personal changes. Kelly defines anxiety as follows:

“Anxiety is the recognition that the events a person encounters lie outside the range of applicability of his construct system” (Kelly, 1955, p. 495).

“The most obvious characteristic of anxiety is, of course, the obvious presence of an element of emotional pain, confusion, confusion and sometimes panic. This emotional state is seen as a reaction to situations in which the individual's constructive system grasps the outlines of the problem only at the most general level, allowing one to conclude only that the set of constructs at the individual's disposal is insufficient to cope with the situation. There must be at least partial recognition of the problem, otherwise the individual simply would not perceive the situation in this way and it would not have such a strong impact on him.”

The source of anxiety can be anything that narrows the range of psychological comfort of the constructive system, increasing the likelihood that the individual will not be able to cope with any of the events that he encounters. Therefore, we can assume that the less developed the constructive system and the fewer constructs it includes, the higher the likelihood of anxiety. A person may experience anxiety in a situation that is not well known to him. Thus, the need to answer questions regarding mathematics can cause extreme anxiety in a person who has not studied this subject.

Although anxiety is a painful condition, it also has its positive aspects. The anxiety that a person experiences is often one of the components of a creative search for new information. Having embarked on the path of discovery, a person is often faced with problems that lie, for the most part, beyond the capabilities of his constructive system at the moment: “...anxiety itself should not be classified as either a positive or a negative phenomenon; it is a sign of the individual's awareness that his constructive system cannot cope with current events. Therefore, this condition is a prerequisite for a revision of the system” (Kelly, 1955, p. 498).

A condition that is often confused with anxiety is the feeling of threat, which is defined as follows:

“Threat is the individual's awareness of impending global changes to which his central structures will be subjected” (Kelly, 1955, p. 498).

In a situation of threat, in contrast to anxiety, the life events that a person is forced to confront are perceived by him quite clearly. Once the problem is recognized, the need for significant changes becomes obvious to the person. People feel threatened in situations that suggest they will undergo changes that will result in them becoming something completely different from what they are now. Kelly points out that impending death is often such an event. Such an event is perceived as inevitable and capable of radically changing the image that a person has formed about himself.

Closely related to threat is the concept of fear, which is defined as follows:

“Fear is the individual's awareness of impending random (and incidental) changes in his central structures” (Kelly, 1955, p. 533)

Fear differs from threat in that the proposed changes are specific rather than global, rather than in the extent to which the changes affect central structures. We fear what we know little about because we are unable to determine how severe the changes we will undergo will be. If we don't know much about radiation poisoning, the prospect of it frightens us. As we gain more knowledge about this phenomenon and its impact on our lives and the lives of future generations, we will experience more anxiety than fear. An event causes fear when it affects only a small part of our life.

Another component of people's transitional emotional experience is described by the personal construct of guilt:

“The individual's sense of seeming to fall out of his central role structure is expressed in feelings of guilt” (Kelly, 1955, p. 502).

Speaking about this concept, which is often approached from a purely external, social point of view, it is important to emphasize that in the theory of personality constructs, guilt is considered as an emotional state that is defined exclusively from the point of view of the individual himself, which corresponds to the view from the inside out. People feel guilty when they discover that their actions are inconsistent with their own self-image. The central role structure includes personal constructs responsible for interactions with other people. These constructs also help a person maintain a sense of integrity and identity. Defining guilt in this way, we can say that people experience guilt when they feel that they are falling out of their role or are faced with a fact that indicates such a falling out. Thus, a person who steals something will experience guilt only if he considers theft incompatible with his ideas about himself. If the theft does not contradict his central role structure, feelings of guilt will not arise. Likewise, if a person has not formed stable role relationships with others, he is unlikely to experience guilt.

With this understanding, the feeling of guilt has little to do with the violation of social norms, which guilt appears from an external point of view. Instead, the concept examines the way in which individuals structure their significant role relationships. This approach to guilt allows us to judge this feeling not only by such external manifestations as formal repentance. Instead, the therapist focuses on the very nature of the individual's self-structure through which the individual can understand the nature of his loss of role and which guides his actions in this transitional situation. Feelings of guilt, like the other conditions discussed in this section, are a sign that personality changes are taking place.

Another transitional state also belongs to this area, but in this case it relates to individual movement forward. This theme is revealed in the definition of aggressiveness:

“Aggression is the active elaboration of one's perceptual field” (Kelly, 1955, p. 508).

Experiencing transitional states of this type is typical for people who are actively implementing the life choices that their constructive system offers them. In aggression there is an element of spontaneity, allowing the individual to more fully explore the consequences of his actions, which his system of constructs indicates to him.

People around such an individual may feel threatened because he is able to involve them in a series of hasty actions that lead to deep personal changes. Aggression often arises in the zone of anxiety, when a person tries to build a structure that allows him to cope with events that are currently beyond his understanding. Aggression is considered in this theory as a predominantly constructive activity, which can be associated with qualities characterized by a person’s self-confidence. Aggressive manifestations, in essence, represent the confident construction of one’s own constructive system. More negative characteristics commonly associated with aggression include the concept of hostility, defined as:

“Hostility is a sustained effort aimed at extorting corroborating evidence in favor of a kind of social forecast that has already been shown to be wrong” (Kelly, 1955, p. 510).

The strength that people see in hostility can be confused with aggression, which is actually just an active (spontaneous) elaboration of one's system. Hostility can take the form of both uncontrollable anger and imperturbable composure, calm and collectedness. The presence or absence of anger is not a defining sign to which we should pay attention. Much more important is the fact that part of the personality's world begins to collapse (turns out to be untenable, refuted), so the person begins to feel that he needs to obtain confirming evidence. The husband becomes hostile when he insists that his wife demonstrate outward expressions of love when in fact, both of them have ceased to feel this feeling for each other. Hostility captures the most central deep structures of the individual experiencing it. This is how we see the hostility of a person fighting for his life. We will probably look at this example of hostility with a degree of compassion, a feeling that usually eludes our ideas about hostility. In any case, the therapist's tasks, as a rule, are associated with identifying what has turned out to be untenable and what makes this inconsistency unbearable for the individual at the moment.

McCoy (1977) attempted to expand the list of concepts of transitional emotional experience by proposing her definitions of confusion, doubt, love, happiness, satisfaction, fear or (sudden) surprise, and anger. We encourage the reader to review her work, which explores these concepts as complementary to Kelly's theory. McCoy defines one of these complementary concepts as follows: “Love: the awareness of the confirmation of one's own central structure... In short, in love, a person sees himself as completed by a person who loves him, thanks to which his central structures are confirmed” (McCoy, 1977, p. 109).

This experience is a kind of total affirmation of oneself as an integral being. In this case, there is a feeling of “completeness of the individual”, which this definition implies. Epting (1977) offered a slightly different definition of love: “Love is a process of confirmation and refutation leading to people's fullest exploration of themselves as whole beings.”

This definition includes not only love found in confirmation, and support as found in confirmation, but also love that refutes those of our manifestations and qualities that are unworthy of us. The act of love is not always expressed in support, but it always takes a direction that leads us to find wholeness. Such love takes us to the very limits of our constructive system and allows us to experience the fullness of life experience.

Cycles of Experience

The final section of the topic of transitional constructs is devoted to cycles of experience, including active and creative manifestations of a person. We will begin our discussion with a cycle regarding the ability to take effective action in your life:

“The R-C-C cycle is a sequential series of constructs involving consideration of options (Circumspection-Preemtion-Control (C-P-C)) leading to the choice that places an individual in a particular situation” (Kelly, 1955 , page 515).

Any method of therapy presupposes an understanding of the actions carried out by a person, otherwise the client will acquire, at best, only a deeper understanding of life, without knowing how to use this understanding in practice. We will begin our analysis of this cycle with the stage of considering options that involve the use of constructs in a hypothetical form. The question being considered by a person is constructed in several different ways at once - the person puts forward different interpretations of life situations. Then comes the turn of anticipation, when one of these alternative dimensions of meaning is selected for more detailed consideration. Without choosing only one dimension, at least for some time, it is impossible to carry out an action, since otherwise a person will endlessly consider alternatives. At this point, life appears before a person in the form of a choice between the poles of one dimension. Thus, a person exercises individual control of his system by making choices and taking certain actions. Thus, a person takes a personal part in the events taking place around him. Of course, the choice is made in the direction of the most complete development of your system as a whole. This cycle allows us to develop our understanding of human actions by determining the weight that each stage of the cycle acquires for a person. At one end of the spectrum we have the passively contemplating client, virtually incapable of taking action because each of the alternatives attracts him independently of the others, so that he cannot make a choice. At the other end we find a client who can be described as a “man of action”, rushing too quickly to make decisions leading to his specific practical actions. Kelly's theory defines impulsivity as follows:

“A characteristic feature of impulsivity is an unjustified reduction in the period of consideration of options, usually preceding the adoption of a decision” (Kelly, 1955, p. 526).

This means that under certain circumstances an individual tries to find an instant solution to a problem. We can expect this behavior to occur when a person feels anxious, guilty or threatened. Understanding this cycle may allow us to formulate the problem of impulsivity and propose effective methods of working with it. The second main cycle is the cycle of creativity:

“The cycle of creativity begins with the emergence of an indeterminate (free) design and ends with the receipt of a strictly ordered and confirmed design” (Kelly, 1955, p. 565).

Thus, the creative process is associated with a decrease and increase in certainty (degree of freedom). As we said earlier, the issue of increasing and decreasing certainty is one of the main ones when developing a strategy for psychotherapeutic treatment. Therefore, we can view the psychotherapeutic process primarily as a creative activity in which the therapist attempts to help the client become more creative with his or her life. The concept of the creativity cycle allows us to answer the question of how a person creates new semantic dimensions, thanks to which his constructive system develops, covering truly new material. It is the use of the term "creativity" to describe these processes that allows us to explain how something fresh and new is introduced into a constructive system.

We will be heading in the right direction to answer this question if we allow the client to increase the uncertainty of his current system of meanings, so that new material has the opportunity to be noticed in some unclear form. At this stage of decreasing certainty, the individual usually tries to refuse to verbalize what is happening. However, as a result of the gradual approach to a new conceptualization, an increasingly rigidly defined structure is formed - a structure that allows verifiable statements to be made, so that their confirmation or refutation becomes possible. Thus, the creative process involves both a decrease and an increase in certainty. In order for new meaning to emerge, the counselor must help the client move through both parts of this process and recognize the value of both for the development of his personality.

Dynamics

“Constructivists” (as psychologists who use Kelly’s ideas as the basis for their theoretical constructions call themselves) evaluate the value of a theory in terms of its usefulness (applicability). For them, as for Kelly, the world is open to an infinite number of constructions, so that no theory can claim to correspond to “reality” to a greater extent than any other. It is not surprising that the psychology of personal constructs has as its main goal changing people's lives. We will look at the ways in which Kelly's followers evaluate the meanings people use in constructing their lives, then we will describe ways of conceptualizing psychological problems in terms of personality construct theory, and we will provide a brief overview of personality construct psychotherapy. Kelly's followers proceed from the idea that people have an innate tendency to activity and development, and therefore most of the theoretical explanations of psychopathology they offer are based on the premise that the individual has ceased to actively develop in certain significant areas of his life.

Assessment of personal meanings

Constructivists, starting with Kelly himself, have developed numerous methods for assessing the meanings we use in everyday life. Some of these techniques are highly structured and require the client to have strong verbal skills, while others are less structured and can be used with clients who are less articulate.

“From the perspective of personality construct theory, behavior is not the answer; that is the question” (Kelly, 1969b, p. 219).

Repertory grid of role constructs (rep-grid)

Kelly developed the Rep-Grid as a method for identifying individual meanings and also to obtain an overall picture of the relationships between these meanings (Table 13.1 shows an example of the Rep-Grid). When filling out the rep grid, the client must first name the names of people who play certain roles in his life (for example, mother, father, brother, sister, closest friend of the same sex, closest friend of the opposite sex, the most unfortunate person known to the client personally, etc.). Typically, the client is asked to name three such individuals and describe how two of them are similar and different from the third. Let's say you named your father; the person you know who has achieved the greatest success; and the person who you think doesn't love you. You may think that your father and the successful person are “hardworking” while the third person is “lazy.” In this case, the assumption is made that the hardworking-lazy dimension has personal meaning (meaning) for you. Next, you are asked to repeat the task with different triplets of people from the list you named.

Table 13. 1. Example of a simplified repertory grid

Note. The columns correspond to different people who play certain roles in a person's life (eg mother, father, brother, sister, etc.). Scores of “*” indicate that the person is best described by that pole of the construct (“hardworking” in line 1, “happy” in line 2). Scores of “#” indicate that the individual is best described by the opposite pole of the construct (“lazy” in line 1, “extremely unhappy” in line 2). Notice that every person who is rated as “hardworking” is also rated as “extremely unhappy,” and every person who is “happy” is also rated as “lazy.”

Once you have proposed a set of personality meanings, such as hardworking-lazy, you may be asked to rate each person on your list on each such construct. This assessment procedure helps clarify how your constructs relate to your personal worldview. Let’s say that in addition to the “hardworking-lazy” pair, you also used the “happy-extremely unhappy (depressed)” pair when contrasting members of the other three people on your list with each other. Additionally, every time you rated a person as “hardworking,” you also rated them as “extremely unhappy” and “lazy” as “happy.” Based on this information, a constructivist might make the assumption that in your worldview, being “hardworking” also means being “unhappy,” and being “happy” also means being “lazy.” If this is the case, you may perceive the prospect of a promotion not as good news, but as a threat, implying increased demands and responsibility.

Self-characterization sketch

Another method developed by Kelly to assess personal meaning is the self-characterization sketch. The client gives a written description of himself from the point of view of a friend who knows the client intimately and is friendly towards him, “perhaps better than anyone else can actually know” (Kelly, 1955a, p. 242). Kelly also instructed the client to describe himself in the third person, beginning with phrases such as “Harry Brown, this is...” (Kelly, 1955a, p. 242).

Part of these instructions (this should be a description of the person from the point of view of his friend, written in the third person) is aimed at getting the person to look at his life from an external position. Another part of the instructions (the other person should be close to the writer and be friendly towards him) aims to reveal deeper aspects of the client's personality, and also to present him in a light that allows him to accept himself. Here, for example, is a fragment of a client’s self-description:

“Jane Doe is going through a difficult time in her life where she no longer understands who she is. However, deep down she feels that she is a good person” (Leitner, 1995a, p. 59).

A constructivist psychotherapist can draw many conclusions from this passage. So, for example, Jane probably wants to say that her current problems are related to traumatic events occurring in the external world, and not to genetic or biochemical disorders in her body. In addition, she may feel that as a result of these traumas, she no longer understands who she is, and the understanding of herself that she had in the past has been destroyed to such an extent that she has lost the point of support that allowed her to maintain a positive image of herself, so that Now she's just adrift, disorientated in the world. The only construct that probably still retained some strength was her understanding of herself as a “good person.” If these assumptions are accurate (that is, they correspond to Jane's actual experience), using them as a basis, the goal of psychotherapeutic treatment can be formulated: to help Jane cope with her traumas in such a way that she can restore a more positive view of herself.

Cross system connections(Systemic bow ties)

Cross-systems linking is a widely used technique used in constructive family therapy to understand how an individual's constructs lead him to act in ways that reinforce another person's fears. In particular, Leitner and Epting (in press) describe the cross-system connections of a couple who sought help in resolving a number of issues that were the subject of their emotional conflicts (see Figure 13.1).

Rice. 13.1. Cross system connections. Reprinted from the article: Leitner, L. M. & Epting, F. R., Constructivist approaches to therapy, in press) for the collection: “Handbook of Humanistic Psychology: Recent Developments in Theory, Research, and Practice” . (K. J. Schneider, J. F. T. Bugental, & J. Fraser Pierson (Eds.) The Handbook of humanistic psychology: Leading edges in theory, research and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.)

“When their differences began to arise, John began to fear that Patsy had stopped loving him (a pole of fear for John). Under the influence of his fear, he tried to protect himself from Patsy's anger by taking an unsteady and evasive position when confronting her. However, Patsy took John's evasiveness as confirming her fears that he did not respect her enough to discuss things frankly with her. Her feelings of disrespect led to her conversations with John taking on a harsh and sarcastic tone, which John took as confirmation that she no longer loved him.”

Identification of systemic connections provides the basis for therapeutic intervention either at the behavioral level or at the level of meanings that determine the behavior of each spouse. Thus, if John tries to be direct and specific, even about his feelings that Patsy no longer loves him, Patsy will feel more respected and her tone will become less sarcastic, which will make John feel loved again. Likewise, if John realizes that Patsy's sarcasm is due to her feelings of insecurity and not a lack of love, he will try to be less evasive. On the other hand, if Patsy could become less sarcastic even while feeling a loss of respect for herself, John would feel more loved and less defensive, which would allow Patsy to feel more respected by John. Moreover, if she had admitted that John's evasiveness was due to fear of losing her, and not a lack of respect; as a result, she might become less sarcastic, which in turn would make John feel more loved, etc. The main goal is to help the couple break the vicious circle in which they find themselves and stop the endless and Further aggravating the situation is the debate over whose perception of reality is “correct.”

Techniques for determining meaning in children

Children have less developed verbal skills than adults, so working with them often requires the use of special techniques to help the therapist understand their worldview. Specifically, Ravenett (1997) asks children to draw a picture based on a given simple pattern (a horizontal line drawn in the center of the page and a slightly rounded line near one edge of the page). After completing the drawing, Ravenette asks the child to draw a picture opposite to the first. He then discusses both of these images with the child: what is happening in these pictures, why the second picture is the opposite of the first, how the child's parents would understand these pictures, etc. Ravenette also encourages children to describe themselves as they would describe themselves from their point of view. their parents (What would your mother say about you?). This and many other techniques developed by Ravenette help children express what they know about their own world but cannot put it into words.

Diagnostics

True to his belief that a theory must be useful to be worthy of attention, Kelly called diagnosis the “planning stage of psychotherapeutic treatment” (1955, p. 14) and viewed it as a fundamentally important step in effective constructivist therapy.

Constructivism and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition(DSM-IV)compiled by the American Psychological Association (1994)

Constructivists believe that the diagnostic system, like any other system used to understand the world around us, is a system for generating meaning, not for detecting “real-life diseases” (Faidley & Leitner, 1993; Raskin & Epting, 1993; Raskin & Lewandowski, 1993). 2000). This point of view is fundamentally different from the approach underlying the DSM-IV diagnostic manual, according to which people themselves “are the real embodiment” of certain mental disorders. In particular, professional psychologists describe “schizophrenics” or “paranoids” as if they were real “objects” rather than professional constructs created to describe the world around them.

Constructive alternativeism, in contrast, argues that reality is open to a myriad of constructions. Therefore, from their point of view, DSM-IV represents only one of many possible ways of understanding people's psychological problems. Psychologists have a professional responsibility to evaluate not only the positive but also the negative implications of using the DSM-IV for understanding human problems, including the potential for the DSM-IV to be used as an instrument of sexist discrimination (Kutchins & Kirk, 1997).

Moreover, the idea that the DSM-IV is the only diagnostic method represents a form of “anticipatory construction,” a cognitive style that assumes that if a certain meaning has already come into use, other meanings have no right to exist.

Because the meanings we use to understand the world around us shape the structure of our experiential understanding of reality, anticipatory construction causes us to lose sight of all alternative ways of perceiving reality.

Transitive diagnostics

Transitive diagnostics suggests that a professional psychologist can help a client make a transitive transition from a system of meaning that generates psychological problems to one that provides more opportunities for personal growth and participation in surrounding events. The constructivist therapist sees his role as actively helping the client on this journey. “The client doesn’t just sit locked in the nosology department; he moves forward along his path. And if the psychologist expects to help him, he must get out of his chair and go on the journey with him” (Kelly, 1955a, pp. 154-155).

Treatment can be understood as the practical application of theory to the client's problem (Leitner, Faidley, & Celentana, 2000). Consequently, transitive diagnosis should be based on the theory that the psychotherapist adheres to in his practice. Thus, for example, a Freudian might use a diagnostic system that allows him to draw conclusions about the ego's defense mechanisms, the strengths and weaknesses of the ego, etc. A follower of Rogers would look for a system that allows the therapist to see the areas of life in which the client receives conditional and unconditional positive strengthening your self-esteem. Constructivists need a system that allows the psychologist to understand the meaning-generating processes used by the client.

Examples of transitive diagnostics. Kelly (1955a, 1955b) proposed several diagnostic constructs that could be useful in psychotherapy (e.g., increasing-decreasing certainty in the construction process, R-U-K cycle, and others). Subsequently, constructivists developed complementary diagnostic systems and applied them in therapeutic practice. In particular, Tschudi (1997) proposed his concept of a “problem” as something that causes psychological discomfort because it places the individual on the negative pole of a dichotomy. Let's say you are "passive" rather than "assertive." You may want to be “assertive” because “passivity” suggests that other people disregard you instead of respecting you. In this case, understanding the construct “other people don’t consider me - others respect me” can make a person want to become less passive.

However, if such a picture were complete, then in order to become more “persistent”, people would only need to read books, take courses and practice the acquired knowledge in real life. Tshudi argues that there is probably another, even more fundamental design. For example, if you become “assertive,” others will likely respect you, but you may also become perceived as “selfish” as opposed to, say, a “decent person.” “Passivity” in your case, despite the pain you feel when people “disregard” you, is an alternative you choose because it protects you from the even greater pain of seeing yourself as “selfish.” A similar point is made by Ecker & Hulley (2000) when describing symptom consistency:

“A symptom or problem is caused by a person because he has at least one unconscious construction of reality according to which he must have this symptom, despite all the suffering and inconvenience caused by its presence” (p. 65).

Leitner, Faidley, & Celentana (2000) propose a diagnostic framework that focuses on understanding the ways in which clients attempt to resolve intimate relationship issues. According to this system, people are seen as needing intimate contact with others in order to give their lives fullness and meaning. However, because such relationships can also deeply wound us, people try to limit the depth of intimate contact. Leitner and his colleagues (Leitner et al., 2000) describe three interrelated axes that help to understand these contradictions in the intimate sphere. The first axis, developmental/structural arrest, describes how individual constructs of self and others (which play such an important role in intimate relationships) can become frozen in growth early in individual development due to trauma. The second axis, relationship intimacy, describes how a person deals with the issue of dependence (e.g., becoming completely dependent on one person, becoming dependent on almost everyone, etc., see Walker, 1993), and the ways in which a person can physically or psychologically distance oneself from others. The third axis, interpersonal empathy, includes creativity, openness, commitment, forgiveness, courage, and respect (Leitner & Pfenninger, 1994), qualities associated with the ability to lead a full and meaningful life that involves deep relationships with others.

Therapy

Kelly clearly formulated the position that the main area of ​​application of the psychology of personal constructs is the psychological reconstruction of human life. In the following pages we will look at the basic principles that underlie any effective therapy for personality constructs.

Mutual exchange of knowledge and experience

Personality construct psychotherapy diverges from the traditional view of therapy, in which a professional expert therapist “treats” the patient. Instead, it is based on the idea that the client brings as much expert knowledge to the therapeutic process as the therapist. The client is always, like no one else, aware of his own specific experience and the reality he creates. Therefore, the therapist must listen carefully to the client and be respectful of the ways in which the client may confirm or contradict the therapist's hypotheses about the client's own life (Leitner & Guthrie, 1993). If a client tells the therapist that something does not correspond to his personal experience, the cause is the therapist's error, not the client's defense mechanisms.

The therapist's contribution to the therapeutic process is knowledge of human relationships and how to use personal experiences to further growth in new directions. In particular, the therapist can offer expertise in the meaning-making process and how to connect with others (Leitner, 1985). In doing so, the therapist creates an environment in which the innate human tendency to generate meaning can be used to grow in new directions (Bohart & Tallman, 1999). In other words, therapy is no more (and no less) mysterious than the process of generating and regenerating one’s own life. The therapeutic process simply occurs under specific conditions under which profound changes become possible (Leitner & Celentana, 1997). We will look at some of the components of constructivist therapy in detail next.

Confidential (“gullible”) approach

A trusting approach is a form of respect for the client and assumes that literally everything the client says is “true.” By “truth” we mean that the information the client communicates conveys important aspects of the client's experience (Leitner & Epting, in press). In other words, the constructivist therapist attempts to be respectful, open, and trusting by literally believing everything the client says. A trusting approach allows us to enter the client’s world and try to perceive the events of his life as if they were happening to us.

Contrast

Constructivist therapists are also well aware of the fact that the generation of meaning is a bipolar activity, which is inherent in contrasts. If you perceive yourself as “passive,” for example, a constructivist might ask you, “What kind of person would you be if you stopped being passive?” If you answer “confident,” the therapist will have a different view of your problems than if you answer “assertive.”

Faidley & Leitner (1993) describe a case in which a client contrasted the word “passive” with “capable of murder.” This woman shot and killed her husband when he told her he was going to file for divorce. In another example, the authors describe a client who had a bipolar construct of depressed-irresponsible. Instead of assuming that the client does not understand the issue, the constructivist therapist will try to find out how “responsibility” relates to “depression” for him. Interestingly, this client was referred to a therapist following a suicide attempt shortly after being offered a very prestigious position at work. In both of these examples, sensitivity to contrast allows the therapist to understand the client's life choices as the client perceives them.

Creativity

Effective constructive therapy always involves creativity on the part of both the therapist and the client (Leitner & Faidley, 1999). The client must creatively reconstruct his life's dilemmas and fears so that a new, more fulfilling and meaningful life can be created from this material, but the client's past must also be respected. The therapist must find ways to assist the client in his creative reconstruction.

Change process

The theory of personal constructs clearly states that our constructions of the world determine our experience of interaction with this world. One implication of this is that to the extent that people construct themselves (or their problems) as unchangeable, opportunities for further growth through therapy are extremely limited. The constructivist therapist attempts to help the client apply the change construct to the problems they are experiencing. The therapist can achieve this goal by asking the client questions such as: “Are there times when you feel better (worse, different)?” In addition, the therapist may also make brief comments to help the client see that his or her perception of the problem is subject to change, even if only slightly (Leitner & Epting, in press).

“Kelly's followers cannot offer a simple prescription for how we should live our lives, since this issue is by its very nature complex and difficult. However, any problem must be adequately structured before we can work with it, and the process of reconstruction must begin by walking around the psychological terrain in search of the most advantageous views” (Burr & Butt, 1992, p. vi).

Fixed Role Therapy

Kelly developed an original method of short-term therapy in which, after drawing up a self-characterization sketch, the therapist writes a new role for the client to act out. After ensuring that the client has a positive attitude towards his new role, Kelly invites the client to experiment with this alternative role for a two-week period. The client is given a new name according to the role and is asked to try to become as much of a “new person” as possible. In this case, the client is encouraged to act, reason, relate to others, and even dream as a person who fits this role would do. At the end of the two-week period, the client and therapist can review the experiment and decide which of the client's experiences was valuable enough to continue working on in the future.

Ideally, fixed role therapy encourages the client to experiment freely with new experiences (Viney, 1981), rather than giving the client strict behavioral instructions about what he or she should become. Thus, the therapist provides the client with the opportunity to experience life events somewhat differently, while simultaneously using the “game” component of the role as a defense against a real threat. In addition, constructivist therapy uses role-playing and role-playing to increase the client's involvement in the environment.

For thought. Playing Fixed Roles

If you want to really get a feel for what Kelly's idea of ​​behavioral experimentation is all about, try the following:

1. Write a one-page self-characterization sketch using the following instructions, taken from Kelly (1955/1991a, p. 242):

“I want you to create a written sketch of the character of (your name) as if he or she were the main character in the play. Describe him as a friend who knows him very intimately and is very friendly to him might describe him, perhaps better than anyone else actually knows him. Be careful that you write about him in the third person. For example, start with the phrase “(Your name), this is...”

2. After drawing up your character sketch, think about what qualities you admire in people that you don’t currently think you possess. Then write a second one-page character sketch, this time of a fictional person who has qualities you admire. Give your character any name you like. Again, be sure to describe him in the third person, using the same format you used to describe your own character. The second sketch is your fixed role sketch.

3. Follow the instructions below, taken from Kelly (1955/199la, p. 285), to describe how to act out a fixed role sketch:

“For the next two weeks, I want you to do something different. I want you to act as if you were (the name given to the fixed role)... For two weeks, try to forget that you are (your name), and that you were ever that person. You are (the name given to the fixed role). You act like this person. You think like this person. You talk to your friends the way you think that person would talk. You do what you think he would do. You even share his or her interests and like the same things that this person would like.

You can assume that we are sending (your name) on vacation for two weeks... and during this period his place will be taken by (the name given to the fixed role). Other people may not know it, but (your name) won't even be around them. Of course, you will have to allow people to continue to call you (your name), but you will think of yourself as (fixed role name).”

4. After two weeks, review your experience. What have you learned? Do you find aspects of your fixed role sketch that you think you will retain in the future.

Now that you have had the opportunity to experience new behaviors through the enactment of a fixed role, what other fixed roles do you think might allow you to try out new constructions of your personality?

Grade

Critics of Kelly's theory reproached him, first of all, for the fact that the psychology of personal constructs is perceived as too formal a system, which pays much more attention to logic and scientific thinking than to human emotions and experiences. This perception is probably due in part to the somewhat ponderous style in which Kelly's The Psychology of Personality Constructs was written (Kelly, 1955a, 1955b). This heavy-handed style can be seen as a negative side effect of Kelly's attempts to gain acceptance of his theory among his fellow psychologists in 1955, a strategy that was probably effective at the time, but these days the mere mention of terms such as postulates and corollaries is more likely to In all, it will scare off most psychologists. Kelly was aware of this problem and was working on a new, less mathematical-sounding presentation of his ideas when he died. And if the reader can look deeper into Kelly's work than the form in which he presented his theory of personality constructs, her fascinating ideas highlighting the process of generating meaning in people's psychological lives will clearly appear before his gaze.

Kelly (1970b) was extremely proud of the fact that representatives of various branches of psychology found his theory compatible with their own professional work. However, Kelly objected to his theory of personality constructs becoming closely associated with any particular psychological approach. As a result, psychologists are often unable to determine how they should classify personality construct theory. Most often, Kelly's theory is classified as a cognitive theory, and in many undergraduate textbooks on personality psychology it is considered along with the theories of Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis. However, Kelly's works have no less, and perhaps more, reasons to be classified as a humanistic approach.

In recent years, Kelly's work has become increasingly associated with constructivism, a body of psychological approaches that emphasize the central role of people in constructing their own psychological meanings and living their lives in accordance with those meanings. Like personality construct theory, constructivist approaches are often seen as relevant to the field of clinical psychotherapy (Ecker & Hulley, 1996; Eron & Lund, 1996; Hoyt, 1998; Neimeyer & Mahoney, 1995; Neimeyer & Raskin, 2000; White & Epston, 1990). However, we can provide evidence that constructivism is permeating other areas of psychology (Botella, 1995; Bruner, 1990; Gergen, 1985; Guidano, 1991; Mahoney, 1991; Sexton & Griffin, 1997). Constructivism's emphasis on the individual's creation of meaning and the living of these meanings is fully consistent with the ideas of constructive alternativeism advocated by Kelly. Typically, constructivist psychologists work within small but closely knit scientific communities. Some personality construct theorists have expressed concerns that Kelly's theory is losing its purity as it becomes just one of many competing psychological approaches (Fransella, 1995). Despite these concerns, in recent years many of Kelly's followers have begun to incorporate elements of other constructivist approaches into their work, as well as narrative therapy and social constructionist themes. In particular, in 1994, the International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology changed its name to the Journal of Constructivist Psychology in order to cover a wider range of areas approaching the meaning approach in psychology , which began with Kelly's theory.

Theory from the original source. Fragment from the book “Psychology of the Unknown”

The following excerpt is compiled from excerpts from Kelly's article "The Psychology of the Unknown." This article was published in the UK, where personality construct theory has gained particular popularity. The article was published in 1977, ten years after Kelly's death. It provides an excellent illustration of how important personal meaning, anticipation, and experience play a role in Kelly's constructivist psychology. It also demonstrates the importance of constructive alternativeism in Kelly's theory, as he openly talks about the endless possibilities for designing life in new directions. Finally, this passage provides the reader with evidence that challenges the long-dominant view of personality construct psychology as a primarily cognitive theory; this is especially true for the part of the article that emphasizes the role of belief in one's own constructs.

“Precisely because we can only dare to look forward if we construct never-repeating events, instead of simply recording and repeating them, we must constantly and boldly leave all questions open to the possibility of fresh reconstruction. No one yet knows what all the alternative constructions might be, and in addition to those to which the history of human thought points us, a huge number of others are possible.

And even those designs that we take for granted every day are likely open to countless radical improvements. However, given how limited our imagination is, it may still be a long time before we are able to look at familiar things in new ways. We tend to mistake familiar constructs for direct, objective observations of what exists in reality, and are extremely suspicious of anything whose subjective origin is still fresh enough in memory to be conscious of us. The fact that the constructs we are familiar with have an equally subjective, although perhaps more distant origin, usually escapes our attention. We continue to treat them as objective observations, as what is “given” in the theorems of our daily lives. It is doubtful, however, whether everything that we today accept as “given” so “realistically” was originally cast in its final form.

We may feel uneasy at first if we imagine ourselves trying to make progress in a world in which there are no firm starting points, no “givens,” nothing we can rely on as something we know for certain. There will, of course, be those who will stubbornly argue that the situation is not at all like that, that there are still infallible sources of evidence, that they know what these sources are, and that our situation will improve if we also believe in them.

As a result of all this, we can no longer be confident that human progress can continue step by step in an orderly manner from the known to the unknown. Neither our sensations nor our doctrines provide us with the direct knowledge required for such a philosophy of science. What we think we know is anchored only by our assumptions, and not by the solid bottom of truth itself, and the world we are trying to understand always remains on the edge of the horizon of our thought. To fully comprehend this principle means to recognize that everything that we believe in as really existing appears to us as we see it only thanks to the constructions we have. Thus, even the most obvious manifestations of this world are completely open to reconstruction in the future. This is what we mean by the expression constructive alternativeism, a term with which we identify our philosophical position.

But let's assume that there really is a real world outside of us - a world largely independent of our assumptions... And while we do believe that our perceptions are anchored by our constructs, we also believe that some constructs serve us better than others in our attempts to anticipate in its entirety what actually happens. The important question remains, however, what these structures are and how we can find out.

...[A] person must begin with his own constructions of the situation - not because he believes them to be true, or because he is convinced that he knows something for sure, and not even because he has convinced himself that this is the best of all possible alternatives...

One begins not with a certainty about how things are, but with faith—a belief that through systematic effort one can get a little closer to understanding what they are. He must not assume that he possesses one shining nugget of “revealed truth,” whether obtained at Mount Sinai or in a psychological laboratory. However, it is important to appreciate the fact that there have been brilliant guesses in the past that are approximations to the truth, and we can demonstrate that some of these guesses are much better than others. And yet, no matter how ingenious these approximations are, a person must live with the belief that he can produce even better ones.

Thus, individual constructions of the situation, for which a person must always take full responsibility, regardless of whether he can formulate them in words or not, provide the starting ground for gaining experience of interaction with events. This means that the individual's personality constructs, rather than physical events, are the springboard to self-involvement in experience. I become aware of the situation, constructing it in my own terms, and it is in these terms that I try to cope with it. Some psychologists call this "opening the self to experience"... I dare to foresee what will happen and put my life on the line by asserting that what will happen will be different because I have personally intervened in what happens. This is how I understand commitment—which I define as “self-involvement plus anticipation.”

There is a psychology that allows you to move forward in the face of uncertainty. This is a psychology that essentially tells us, “Why don't we go ahead and construct events so that they are organized, or, if you like, disorganized in such a way that we can do something with them. In the world of the unknown, seek experience, and at the same time seek to go through the full cycle of experience. This means that if you move forward and involve yourself in events, instead of remaining alienated from human struggle; if you take the initiative and realize your anticipations; if you dare to be loyal; if you are ready to analyze the results systematically; and if you have the courage to throw away your favorite psychologisms and intellectualisms and reconstruct life to its core, well, you may not be destined to find out that your guesses were correct, but you have a chance to become freer and go beyond those “ "obvious" facts that you now think define your position, and you can get a little closer to the truth that lies somewhere beyond the horizon.

Key Concepts

Aggressiveness(Aggressiveness). A person is aggressive when he actively tests his constructs in practice. Aggression is an excellent way to develop, revise, and clarify your own constructs.

Anxiety(Anxiety). Occurs when an individual’s own constructs are not applicable to the events that happen to him.

Behavior as experiment(Behavior as an experiment). This concept is closely related to Kelly's metaphor of man as scientist; its main idea is that we test our personal constructs for suitability by implementing them in our behavior. The results of our actions either confirm or refute our constructs. This, in turn, leads us to maintain or revise the ways in which we form our constructs.

Constructive alternativeism(Constructive alternativism). The philosophical starting point for personality construct psychology, which states that there are countless ways to construct events and that people only need to seize new opportunities to construct the world in new ways.

R-U-K-decision cycle (C- P- Cdecision-making cycle). This cycle consists of three stages necessary to make a decision. In the first, a person circumspects his personality constructs, trying to determine which construct dimensions apply to the situation in which he finds himself. Having selected several adequate constructs, he preempts one specific construct dimension as the most useful for use in a given situation. Finally, he exercises control by choosing one of the poles of the anticipatory constructive dimension used for a given situation.

Eleven corollaries(Eleven corollaries). Each corollary formulated within the framework of personality construct psychology develops its basic idea that people make predictions in accordance with their constructs and experience them in their personal experience.

Fear(Fear). Occurs as a result of inevitable impending changes in the individual's peripheral constructs.

Fundamental Postulate(Fundamental postulate). Says that individual psychological processes are canalized in accordance with the ways in which the individual anticipates events. This postulate assumes that anticipation of what will happen in the future has a decisive influence on the formation of personal constructs.

Hostility(Hostility). Occurs when an individual tries to put pressure on events to conform to his own constructs, despite the fact that these events refute his constructs.

Free design limited by rigid boundaries(Loose versus tight construction). A loose (undefined) construct allows for a wide variety of predictions, while a strictly defined construct allows for reliable predictions. If a construct is too vague, predictions are completely unreliable. If a construct is too strictly defined, it leaves no room for creativity or alternative outcomes.

Personal constructs(Personal constructs). Bipolar dimensions of meaning that people apply to the world around them in order to meaningfully anticipate future events. The constructs are bipolar and include a certain characteristic and its opposite. Examples of bipolar constructs are: “happy-responsible”, “strong-vulnerable”, “fearful-talkative”, etc. The constructs of each individual are hierarchically organized.

Repertory grid(Repertory grid). A construct elicitation technique in which the subject is asked to make a list of significant others in his life. The persons listed in this list are grouped into various triadic combinations; for each trio of people, the subject indicates how two of them are similar and how they differ from the third. The answer that the subject offers for each triad constitutes a personality construct.

Threat(threat). Occurs as a result of impending inevitable changes affecting the central constructs of the individual.

Transitive diagnostics(Transitive diagnosis). Kelly's approach to clinical diagnosis that does not rely on the use of diagnostic labels. Instead, the specific feature of this approach is an attempt to understand the personality constructs of the individual and to find ways to help him make a transitive transition to those constructs that open up new personal meanings that the client finds more productive and enriching psychologically.

Annotated bibliography

Clearly written and easy to read, Barr's Introduction to Social Constructionism is an excellent introduction for beginners, laying out the basic principles of social constructionism.

Burr, V., & Butt, T. (1992). Invitation to personal constructive psychology. London Whurr Publishers.

Barr V., Butt T. “Introduction to the psychology of personality constructs.” Written in engaging language, this introductory work invites the reader to apply Kelly's theory to everyday life.

Ecker, B., Hulley, L. (1996). Depth-oriented brief psychotherapy. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Ecker and Halley's book, Depth-Oriented Brief Psychotherapy, introduces readers to modern constructivist psychotherapy, which emphasizes the role of unconscious attitudes (constructs), as well as methods for identifying and psychotherapeutically working with these constructs.

Epting, F. R. (1984). Personal constructive counseling and psychotherapy. New York: John Wiley.

Epting's book Counseling and Psychotherapy of Personality Constructs provides a clear and detailed description of personality construct psychology and its psychotherapeutic applications.

Eron, J. W., & Lund, T. W. (1996). Narrative solutions in brief therapy. New York: Guilford.

Eron and Lund's book Narrative Solutions in Brief Therapy describes a new constructivist approach to psychotherapy, and although it is not directly based on the psychology of personality constructs, it owes much to the meaning-oriented approaches of Kelly and Rogers.

Faidley, A. J., Leitner, L. M. (1993). Assessing experience in psychotherapy: Personal construct alternatives. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Faidley and Leitner's book, Experience Assessment in Psychotherapy: Alternatives to Personality Constructs, is a professionally written overview of constructivist assessment (diagnosis) and therapy methods and contains numerous case histories.

The first chapter of F. Francella's book "George Kelly" is a detailed biography of Kelly, based on the memories of his students and colleagues; the rest of the book is a good introduction to the psychology and psychotherapy of personality constructs.

Gergen, K. J. (1991). The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life. New York: Basic Books.

Gergen K. J. "The Rich Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Modern Life." This professional publication is a summary of Gergen's ideas regarding human identity in a postmodern world.

Journal of Constructivist Psychology (1988-Present).

The Journal of Constructivist Psychology, formerly the International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, publishes theoretical and empirical articles written from the perspective of personality construct psychology and other constructivist approaches.

Kelly, G. A. (1963). A theory of Personality. New York: Norton.

This paperback edition of Kelly's A Theory of Personality contains the first three chapters of the first volume of his The Psychology of Personality Constructs. The book is an inexpensive and easily accessible alternative to reading Kelly's two-volume work in its entirety.

Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of personal constructs: Vol. 1. A theory of personality. London: Routledge.

Kelly J. A. “Psychology of Personal Constructs.” Volume 1. "The Theory of Personality" (Reprint of the original 1955 work).

The first volume contains an exposition of Kelly's basic theory, written in the author's inimitable style. In addition to the basic theory, the first volume included a description of the repertory grid and fixed role therapy.

Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of personal constructs: Vol. 2. Clinical diagnosis and psychotherapy. London: Routledge.

Kelly J. A. “Psychology of Personal Constructs.” Volume 2. “Clinical diagnosis and psychotherapy” (Reprint of the original work of 1955).

The second volume is devoted to applied aspects of the psychology of personal constructs and, above all, to psychotherapeutic applications. The book, among other applications, describes transitive diagnostics, as well as personality construct disorders.

Maher, B. (Ed.) (1969). Clinical psychology and personality: The selected papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley.

Maher B. (Ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: Selected Manuscripts of George Kelly.

The works included in this collection were written late in Kelly's professional career, from 1957 until the end of his life. These works have a less formal and more readable style than The Psychology of Personality Constructs; In addition, in these works the psychology of personal constructs is presented in a less cognitivist light.

Neimeyer, R. A. & Mahoney, M. J. (Eds.) (1995). Constructivism in psychotherapy. Washington. DC: American Psychological Association.

Niemeyer R., Mahoney M. (Eds.). "Constructivism in psychotherapy." A collection of articles presenting a wide range of constructivist approaches to psychotherapy, some of which are based on Kelly's ideas.

Neimeyer, R. A. & Mahoney,. M. J. (Eds.) (1990-2000). Advances in personal constructive psychology (Vol. 1-5). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Niemeyer R., Mahoney M. (Eds.). "New achievements in the psychology of personal constructs." An ongoing series of books examines new developments related to personality construct psychology and constructivism.

Neimeyer, R. A. & Mahoney, M. J. (Eds.) (2000). Constructions of disorder: Meaning-making frameworks for psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Niemeyer R., Mahoney M. (Eds.). “Constructions of Disorder: Schemes for the Generation of Meaning in Psychotherapy.” Richly illustrated with patient narratives, the book provides an introduction to constructivist approaches to mental health diagnosis and psychotherapy that are not based on the diagnostic categories proposed in the DSM-IV manual.

Web sites

http://www.med.uni-giessen.de/psychol/internet.htm

The main site dedicated to Kelly's theory. Contains links to most of the world's Internet resources, new newsletters, training programs, publications, as well as special techniques and treatment courses.

http://repgrid.com/pcp/

Another largest site dedicated to the psychology of personal constructs. The authors strive to find and post links to sites in all countries related to this topic. Convenient to use.

http://www.brint.com/PCT.htm

The site is intended for therapists and serious researchers.

http://ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/PCP/Kelly.html

A short and complete bibliography of Kelly's works, as well as those of his followers.

http://www.oikos.org/kelen.htm

The site has an upbeat feel and contains a curated collection of quotes from Kelly's work, as well as a list of articles dedicated to him.

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George Alexander Kelly (1905-1966) - American psychologist.

Author of the concept of “personal constructs”, according to which the organization of a person’s mental processes is determined by how it anticipates (“constructs”) future events (“Psychology of Personal Constructs”, 1955). Kelly interpreted a person as a researcher who constantly builds his own image of reality through an individual system of categorical scales - personal constructs - and, based on this image, puts forward hypotheses about future events. Disconfirmation of these hypotheses leads to a greater or lesser restructuring of the construct system, which makes it possible to increase the adequacy of subsequent predictions. Kelly developed the methodological principle of “repertory lattices,” with the help of which methods for diagnosing the characteristics of the individual construction of reality were created, which have found application in various areas of psychology.

As a psychotherapist, J. Kelly worked in line with cognitive therapy, being essentially its founder. Look →

J. Kelly and cognitive psychotherapy

The beginning of cognitive therapy is associated with the work of George Kelly (Ch. L. Doyle, 1987). In the 1920s, George Kelly used psychoanalytic interpretations in his clinical work. He was amazed at the ease with which patients accepted Freudian concepts that Kelly himself found absurd. As an experiment, Kelly began to vary the interpretations he gave to patients within a variety of psychodynamic schools.

It turned out that the patients equally accepted the principles proposed to them and were full of desire to change their lives in accordance with them. Kelly concluded that neither Freud's analysis of childhood conflicts, nor even the study of the past as such, were of decisive importance. According to Kelly, Freud's interpretations were effective because they disrupted patients' habitual ways of thinking and provided them with the opportunity to think and understand in new ways.

The success of clinical practice with a variety of theoretical approaches, according to Kelly, is explained by the fact that during the course of therapy there is a change in the way people interpret their experiences and how they look at the future. People become depressed or anxious because they are trapped in rigid, inadequate categories of their own thinking. For example, some people believe that authority figures are always right, so any criticism from an authority figure is depressing to them. Any technique that leads to a change in this belief, whether it is based on a theory that associates such a belief with the Oedipus (20:) complex, with the fear of loss of parental love, or with the need for a spiritual guide, will be effective. Kelly decided to create techniques to directly correct maladaptive ways of thinking.

He encouraged patients to become aware of their beliefs and examine them. For example, an anxious, depressed patient was convinced that disagreeing with her husband's opinion would cause him to become very angry and aggressive. Kelly insisted that she nevertheless try to express her own opinion to her husband. Having completed the task, the patient was convinced that it was not dangerous. Such homework assignments became routine in Kelly's practice. Sometimes Kelly even offered patients the role of a new person with a new view of themselves and others - first in therapy sessions and then in real life. He also used role-playing games. Kelly concluded that the core of neuroses is maladaptive thinking. The neurotic's problems lie in present ways of thinking, not in the past. The therapist's job is to identify unconscious categories of thinking that lead to suffering and teach new ways of thinking.

Kelly was one of the first psychotherapists to try to directly change the thinking of patients. This goal underlies many modern therapeutic approaches, which are collectively known as cognitive therapy.

At the present stage of development of psychotherapy, the cognitive approach in its pure form is almost never practiced: all cognitive approaches use behavioral techniques to a greater or lesser extent. This is true for “rational emotive therapy” as well.

Kelly George Alexander(George Alexander Kelly, 1905-1966) - American psychologist, author of the original theory of personality and founder of the scientific school of psychology of personal constructs.

Psychological Dictionary. A.V. Petrovsky M.G. Yaroshevsky

(1905-1966) - American psychologist. The author of the concept of “personal constructs”, according to which the organization of a person’s mental processes is determined by how it anticipates (“constructs”) future events (“Psychology of Personal Constructs”, 1955). A person was interpreted by K. as a researcher who constantly builds his own image of reality through an individual system of categorical scales - personal constructs - and, based on this image, puts forward hypotheses about future events. Disconfirmation of these hypotheses leads to a greater or lesser restructuring of the construct system, which makes it possible to increase the adequacy of subsequent predictions.

Kelly developed the methodological principle of “repertory lattices”, with the help of which methods for diagnosing the characteristics of the individual construction of reality were created, which have found application in various fields of psychology.

Literature

• Personality theory. Psychology of personal constructs. St. Petersburg, Speech, 2000
• Kelly G.A. The psychology of personal constructs: Vol.1. A theory of personality. London: Routledge., 1991., (Original work published 1955)
• Kelly G.A. The psychology of personal constructs: Vol.2. Clinical diagnosis and psychotherapy. London: Routledge., 1991., (Original work published 1955)

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