Inquiring Man

The Psychology of Personal Constructs (3rd Edition)

Don Bannister, Fay Fransella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429638688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

Originally published in 1986, this was a new and completely updated edition of the book which, since 1970 had introduced a whole generation in English psychology to Kelly's theory of personal constructs.

By setting out a broadly designed and experimentally illustrated view of people as self-inventing explorers and interpreters of their world it challenged the 'mechanical man' of orthodox psychology. It proved a source of radically new ideas in psychotherapy, education and industry.

This revised edition shows how the theory's professional applications have spread ever wider, while many have realised that personal construct psychology contains, for them, the core of a personal philosophy.

1 The Psychology of Personal Constructs

When a scientist propounds a theory he has two choices: he can claim that what he says has been dictated to him by the real nature of things, or he can take sole responsibility for what he says and claim only that he has offered one man’s hopeful construction of the realities of nature. In the first instance he makes a claim to objectivity on behalf of his theory, the scientist’s equivalent of the claim to infallibility. In the second instance he offers only a hope that he may have hit upon some partial truth that may serve as a clue to inventing something better and he invites others to follow this clue to see what they can make of it. In this latter instance he does not hold up his theoretical proposal to be judged so much in terms of whether it is the truth at last or not — for he assumes from the outset that ultimate truth is not so readily at hand — but to be judged in terms of whether his proposition seems to lead toward and give way to fresh propositions; propositions which, in turn, may be more true than anything else has been thus far. (Kelly, 1969, pp. 66-7)

Currently many psychologists feel that psychology should concern itself more with ‘whole’ people. It should centre more on ‘real human experience’. This is comical in one sense — it is as if sailors suddenly decided they ought to take an interest in ships — but necessary in another. A variety of vanities have caused psychologists to turn their backs on the complete and purposeful person. A craving to be seen, above all, as scientists has led them to favour the clockwork doll, the chemical interaction or the environmentally imprisoned rat as their models of humanity. Further decades of massive production by psychologists has left us still open to Notcutt’s accusation:

Scientism is to science as the Pharisee is to the man of God. In the psychology of scientism there is everything to impress the onlooker — enormous libraries, and a systematic search of the journals, expensive instruments of exquisite precision and shining brass, complicated formulas, multi-dimensional geometries and differential equations, long strange words of Greek origin, freshly minted enormous calculating machines and white coated girls to punch them — all the equipment is there to make the psychologist feel that he is being really scientific — everything in fact except ideas and results. Full many a glorious thesis have I seen wending its dignified way to a trivial and predestined inconclusion, armed cap-à-pie with all the trappings of scientism; the decimals correct, the references in order, only the mind lacking. (Notcutt, 1953, p.4)

It seems that once a profession of ‘psychologists’ was established it was deemed necessary to find ways of viewing people which would maintain a decent trade union differential between the professional psychologist and his object of study, the ‘organism’.

Nothing So Practical As A Good Theory

In every scientific discipline, bar psychology, workers seem to accept the idea that their science will advance in terms of elaborating and testing theories. In psychology many of us behave as if ‘theory’ were like heaven — a fine place to go to when the practical business of living is all over, but not a matter of much concern here and now. We manifest our contempt for theory by using the word indiscriminately. We devalue it by referring to little assemblies of concepts, notions such as ‘cognitive dissonance’, ‘reversal theory’, ‘catastrophe theory’, and so forth.

The term ‘theory’ should be reserved for extensive and elaborated systems of ideas cast in terms of an integrated language. Users should not have to borrow, in every intellectual emergency, from elsewhere and conclude by assembling a ragbag of concepts which cannot be cross-related. It should be reserved for such formalised structures of ideas as have a wide range of convenience so that they may ultimately explain much that is not even envisaged at the time they are constructed. Yet always the explanation must be derivable from, and relatable to, what has gone before.

A theory is not a dogma

A common objection to theories stems from the belief that they are limiting, blinkering and imprisoning devices. This belief confuses theory with dogma. A dogma is something that it is proposed we live by — a scientific theory is something that it is proposed we live with and explore. In the case of dogma we may cherish and defend it, in the case of a scientific theory we should cherish and attack it. Scientific theories must be regarded as expendable; they are designed to be tested to the limit. Far from blinkering they should liberate in the sense that they formulate new issues for us to consider, new pathways for us to explore — issues and pathways which would not be available to us had not the theory pointed out their existence.

The kind of psychologist who sees theory as enslavement usually sees empiricism and eclecticism as kinds of freedom. But the near-mindless collection of data and its promiscuous attachment to whatever stray concepts happen to be around in times of need, is not freedom. It is a lack of point and direction. On this issue of theory and freedom Kelly said:

Theories are the thinking of men who seek freedom amid swirling events. The theories comprise prior assumptions about certain realms of these events. To the extent that the events may, from these prior assumptions, be construed, predicted and their relative courses charted, men may exercise control, and gain freedom for themselves in the process. (Kelly, 1955, p. 22)

Characteristics of the Psychology of Personal Constructs

There are several respects in which personal construct psychology may seem strange to those encountering it for the first time.

Presentation

Firstly, it is presented as a complete, formally stated theory. This is very unusual in psychology, where theories tend to be stalactitic growths, which have accumulated over the years (often with later accumulations contradicting earlier ones). It would be a brave and foolish person who said they knew exactly what learning theory’ was or what ‘Freudian theory’ was. Construct theory was put forward as a complete and formal statement by one man at one time (Kelly, 1955). Although experiments, arguments and interpretations have built up around the theory, it is still possible to state its central tenets in an orderly fashion.

Reflexivity

Secondly, the theory is reflexive. Personal construct theory is an act of construing which is accounted for by personal construct theory. Putting it another way, it does not, like learning theory, account for all kinds of human behaviour except the formulation of learning theory. Construct theory treats scientists as persons and persons as scientists. One of the effects of this is to make the model person of personal construct psychology look recognisably like you: that is, unless you are the very modest kind of person who sees themselves as the stimulus-jerked puppet of learning theory, the primitive infant of psychoanalytic theory or the perambulating telephone exchange of information theory. If you do not recognise yourself at any point in personal construct psychology, you have discovered a major defect in it and are entitled to be suspicious of its claims.

Level of abstraction

Thirdly, construct theory was deliberately stated in very abstract terms to avoid, as far as possible, the limitations of a particular time and culture. It is an attempt to build a theory with a very wide range of convenience, a theory not tied to one particular concept-phenomenon. It is not a theory of learning’, of interpersonal relationshps’, of ‘development’, of ‘perception’. It is certainly not a ‘cognitive’ theory, although many textbooks have tried to categorise it as such, perhaps because the authors could not comprehend the shocking idea that Kelly did not want to use, at all, the construct of cognition versus emotion (Bannister, 1977, Mancuso and Hunter, 1983).

It is a theory which attempts to redefine psychology as a psychology of persons. At first reading, the theory often seems dry because it is deliberately content-free. It is the user of the theory who has to supply a content of which the theory might make sense. Kelly had particular terrains which concerned him, such as the understanding of psychotherapy, but he sought to make his psychology comprehensive enough to serve the purposes of those with very different issues in mind.

Philosophical assumptions

Finally, the theory does not have its philosophical assumptions buried deep inside it, it has them explicitly stated. Kelly gave the label constructive alternativism to these philosophical assumptions and argued them at some length. At one point he summarises them thus:

Like other theories, the psychology of personal constructs is the implementation of a philosophical assumption. In this case the assumption is that whatever nature may be, or howsoever the quest for truth will turn out in the end, the events we face today are subject to as great a variety of constructions as our wits will enable us to contrive. This is not to say that one construction is as good as any other, nor is it to deny that at some infinite point in time human vision will behold reality out to the utmost reaches of existence. But it does remind us that all our present perceptions are open to question and reconsideration and it does broadly suggest that even the most obvious occurrences of everyday life might appear utterly transformed if we were inventive enough to construe them differently.

This philosophical position we have called constructive alternativism, and its implications keep cropping up in the psychology of personal constructs. It can be contrasted with the prevalent epistemological assumptions of accumulative fragmentalism, which is that truth is collected piece by piece. While constructive alternativism does not argue against the collection of information, neither does it measure the truth by the size of the collection. Indeed it leads one to regard a large accumulation of facts as an open invitation to some far-reaching reconstruction which will reduce them to a mass of trivialities.

A person who spends a great deal of his time hoarding facts is not likely to be happy at the prospect of seeing them converted into rubbish. He is more likely to want them bound and preserved, a memorial to his personal achievement. A scientist, for example, who thinks this way, and especially a psychologist who does so, depends upon his facts to furnish the ultimate proof of his propositions. With these shining nuggets of truth in his grasp it seems unnecessary for him to take responsibility for the conclusions he claims they thrust upon him. To suggest to him at this point that further human reconstruction can completely alter the appearance of the precious fragments he has accumulated, as well as the direction of their arguments, is to threaten his scientific conclusions, his philosophical position, and even his moral security. No wonder, then, that, in the eyes of such a conservatively minded person, our assumption that all facts are subject — are wholly subject — to alternative constructions looms up as culpably subjective and dangerously subversive to the scientific establishment. (Kelly, 1970, pp. 1-2)

Kelly is here asserting that we cannot contact an interpretation-free reality directly. We can only make assumptions about what reality is and then proceed to find out how useful or useless these assumptions are. This is a popular contention in modern philosophy and many psychologists pay at least lip-service to it. However, in much psychological writing there is a tendency to revert to the notion of a reality whose nature can be clearly identified. Hence the use of the term ‘variable’ as in the phrase ‘variables such as intelligence must be taken into account’. ‘Intelligence’ is a dimension which we have invented and in terms of which we construe others. It is not a thing which must be taken into account. Entirely different constructions can be used which do not involve such a dimension at all. In our schooldays we recognised constructive alternativism when we wrote our history essays in terms of the political, religious and social aspects of a particular period. However, even then there was a tendency to talk about political, religious and social ‘events’ as if these were really separate events, rather than various ways of construing the same events.

Free will versus determination

This approach has implications for the great free will versus determinism debate. One is that free-determined is a way we construe acts and it is useful only to the extent that it discriminates between acts. To say that one is entirely determined is as meaningless as to say that one is entirely free. The construction (like all interpretations) is useful only as a distinction and the distinction must have a specific range of convenience. A person is free with respect to something and determined with respect to something else. In this way construct psychology avoids the determinist argument that puts the arguer in the paradoxical position of being a puppet deciding that he is a puppet. How many scientists, who say that they are determinists, sound like determinists when they are describing the glories of scientific method? They extol a deliberate manipulation of the universe in order to explore (note the teleology) its nature. Equally, construct theory avoids the doctrine of unlimited free will which suggests a humanity that cannot be understood because it has no ‘cause and effect’ aspects. In contrasting this approach with that of Freudians (you are the victim of your infancy) and behaviourists (you are the victim of your reinforcement schedules), Kelly argued that you are not the victim of your autobiography though you may enslave yourself by adhering to an unalterable view of what your biography means. Thereby you may fixate your present.

From this same standpoint Kelly rejects ‘hydraulic’ theories of humanity — theories which postulate some ‘force’ (motive, instinct, drive) within persons, impelling them to movement. He argues that it is entirely unnecessary to account for movement in a theory which makes movement its central assumption. Thus he says:

Suppose we began by assuming that the fundamental thing about life is that it goes on. It isn’t that something makes you go on; the going on is the thing itself. It isn’t that motives make a man come alert and do things; his alertness is an aspect of his very being. (Kelly, 1962, p. 85)

In the light of this approach we see that Kelly is not proposing personal construct psychology as a contradiction of other psychologies, but as an alternative to them — an alternative which does not deny the ‘truths’ of other theories, but which may provide more interesting, more inspiring, more useful and more elaborate ‘truths’.

The Formal Structure of Personal Construct Theory

The theory is formally stated as a fundamental postulate and eleven corollaries (Mancuso and Adams-Webber, 1982).

Fundamental postulate: A person s processes are psychologically channelised by the ways in which they anticipate events.

This implies many things. It implies that you are not reacting to the past so much as reaching out for the future; it implies that you check how much sense you have made of the world by seeing how well that ‘sense’ enables you to anticipate it; it implies that your personality is the way you go about making sense of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Psychology of Personal Constructs
• 2 The Person in Psychology
• 3 Exploring the Person
• 4 The Developing Person
• 5 Person to Person
• 6 The Person in Need of Help
• 7 The Person as Self-Creator and Self-Destroyer
• 8 A Personal Psychology
• Appendix
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index