George Kelly

The Psychology of Personal Constructs

Trevor Butt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781349876228
• eBook ISBN: 9781350312708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Kelly's pragmatic approach to psychology arose from his clinical practice and has been a strong formative influence on clinical psychology and personality theory. Taking us through the development of Kelly's work and setting it in its historical context, this is a fascinating account of one of the foremost personality theories of the 20th century.

1 Issues in Personality

This book is about George Alexander Kelly and the personality theory he devised: Personal Construct Theory (hereafter, PCT). Few people outside academia will have heard of it. When we think of ‘personality’, we might think of major traits that people are supposed to have – are they introverts or extraverts? We might wonder about deep and buried impulses and appetites, unconscious forces that carry them along in mysterious ways. We are used to imagining that each of us has a true self that we are trying to get in touch with – perhaps an understanding of personality can help us here? Or we may have heard of the strange vocabulary of conditioning theories – reinforcement and stimuli – and ponder how these forces determine what we do. Kelly’s theory deals in none of these ideas. And yet it has infused a lot of contemporary psychological thinking. Psychology today is at last recognising the importance of personal narratives and how they shape individuals’ lives. As we shall see, it was the work of George Kelly that first launched this approach. Just how is it that psychologists have evolved so many different ways of looking at people, and how can they help us get a grip on our lives? In this chapter, I want to review the history of personality theories. Where did they come from? What are they for? And what use are they? Then we will be able to see how Kelly’s work fits into the picture.

One of the interesting facts about the notion of personality is that it is quite a recent idea. At first, this might seem surprising. We are after all, embedded in a cult of celebrity nowadays. People do not seem to need talent or to have done very much to be famous. They become prominent merely because they are ‘personalities’. Yet a few hundred years ago, people had little use for the concept. Individuality was not as prized. Compared with life now, there were far fewer choices available. There was not a great degree of latitude available to you. Most people lived short lives and never travelled beyond their immediate vicinity. There was very little time for reflection. Keeping body and soul together must have been a challenge that preoccupied most of our forebears. And you could tell what different individuals were up to generally simply by knowing their station in life. Someone might be a servant, a peasant, a tradesman, or belong to the landed gentry. This would all be signalled by everything he did – even by the clothes he wore. Of course, one knight may have been subtly different from another as they went into battle, and the way in which peasants varied in the face of adversity might show a range of different strategies. There was such a thing as character. This was a measure of moral worth, and showed itself in the trials and tribulations that made up everyone’s life. The various religious systems all had their recipes for how to live a good life, and dictated moral codes that people should attempt to follow. But the notion of personality is a modern one.

Social scientists use the term ‘modern’ in a particular way. It refers to the modern period that is usually deemed to have begun in Europe in the eighteenth century. Modern societies were different in many ways from the traditional societies that preceded them. They were less hierarchical and more complex. This went along with changes in the power structure. Aristocrats whose wealth came from the land they owned were beginning to have to share power with the new middle classes whose money came from manufacturing and trade. Individual work and effort were being rewarded, not just in Heaven, but here on earth. Even Christianity had to adapt. People were no longer content to have the mysteries of religion interpreted for them by a priest who intoned the mass in Latin. As Kelly noted, the Reformation had introduced the idea that each man was his own priest. Following a battle to allow the translation of the Bible into other languages, everyone now had access to the scriptures. Each person became more of a centre for moral responsibility. Character was now a matter not just of obedience, but choice. Protestantism brought with it the idea that a person’s fate lay in his own hands. Goodness lay not in invisible intention to which only God had access, but in action. Hard work and productivity were the indices of moral worth now. Modernity ushered in the rise of the individual.

This, then, was the social climate in which the idea of personality germinated and developed. It is not so much a discovery as an invention or construction. Now saying personality is a construction is not to say that it is ephemeral or imaginary. It is not to deny that it is in some sense ‘real’. All that is meant by ‘construction’ is that things could have been put together in a different way, as indeed they had been in traditional societies. When we read Plutarch’s analyses of lives of influential Romans and Greeks, or Seutonius’s accounts of the early Roman emperors, we can detect something akin to a parallel version of personality theory. But these are not cast in terms that make much sense to us. Instead, individuals were the vehicles for supernatural forces. Omens like eagles or earthquakes at their birth indicated how the gods intended them to develop. Nowadays, we think of people as being individuals who are, at least to some extent, in control of their lives. Different constructions belong to different eras. And different constructions may also be called on as explanations at the same time. There will always be alternative perspectives that can be taken on any event. Something happens in the real world that is of interest and we try to make sense of it. Different constructions might be called on to do this job. Kelly called this process ‘constructive alternativism’.

Unusually for a personality theorist, Kelly began by making his philosophical stance (that is, of constructive alternativism) both prominent and explicit. As we will see in chapter 2, this is based on the pragmatism of John Dewey. Constructive alternativism holds that there will be many different ways of looking at the same thing (or to use Kelly’s vocabulary, construing the same event). It is never a question of which is the correct way. Right versus wrong is not a dimension that is useful here. Instead, we should ask if a particular construction is useful for our purposes. Personality theories have had varying interests and aims, and this is one reason why psychology has evolved many different theories of personality.

The history of personality

Contemporary personality theories have their roots in developments that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century. This was also the time when psychology as a separate discipline began to emerge. It was embedded in both philosophy and physiology, and in the process of being defined as a distinguishable area of study. We can make out three traditions within this emerging psychology, all of which contributed to the definition of personality. These were the clinical, psychometric and experimental traditions. It would be misleading to see them as entirely separate, but each was related to different aims. We can see them interwoven in the history of personality theory.

A key date in the development of contemporary psychology was 1914. This was when John Watson left the philosophy department at the University of Chicago, and with others, founded the first department of experimental psychology. William James had been the first North American professor of psychology nearly twenty years previously. But his massive contribution was for many years eclipsed by the dominance of Watson’s behaviourism. John Dewey and George Herbert Mead were also prominent psychologists of the day also now frequently thought of more as philosophers. This is because Watson was the one who insisted that psychology model itself after physics and the other natural sciences. It was to be concerned with publicly observable events only. This meant a focus on behaviour – not invisible minds, intentions, thoughts or feelings. It was now an experimental science, and not mere ‘armchair philosophy’. Watson’s doctrine was called behaviourism, and was the dominant form of experimental psychology for the next sixty years. It would lead to experiments, often on rats and pigeons, which were expected to result in uncovering laws of behaviour that could then be applied to humans and other species.

Personality was something of a problem for this early experimental science. People seem to have idiosyncratic identities. They appear to us not just as ping-pong balls with memories, but as having individual personalities. But personality could not be observed directly, only inferred from patterns of behaviour. As Kelly observed, these early experimental psychologists must have lived in two separate worlds. They must have observed characteristic patterns of behaviour, emotion and thought both in themselves and in others. When they conducted experiments, they formed theories, had hunches, and were passionately involved in outcomes. However, when they studied other people, they did not credit them with the same attributes. Instead, they were merely behaving organisms. There was no direction or meaning to their behaviour. No, they were at the mercy of conditioned reflexes and reinforcing consequences. Personality was an embarrassment to behaviourism, and had to develop in spheres parallel to academia: psychometrics and psychiatry.

The psychometric tradition focused on what used to be called ‘mental measurement’. Alfred Binet in France had been asked to devise tests of mental ability (later termed intelligence quotient, or IQ tests). These were to be used in diagnosing intellectual weakness in school children. Many developments in IQ measurement followed in Europe and the USA. Now it is a lot easier to measure height or weight than intelligence. This is because with physical characteristics, it is not only clear what exactly is being measured, but there is a simple scale in use that has a definite zero point. How can we ever measure invisible mental attributes? The answer statisticians came up with was that everything should be charted with respect to a normal point. This indicates what the hypothetical average person should score, and is estimated by applying the scale to a large number of individuals. This results in tables of norms that tell the psychologist how an individual’s score fits into scores distributed in the general population.

Gordon Allport was perhaps the first North American psychologist recognised as a personality theorist. In the 1920s he was interested in the dynamic organisation within each individual that led to characteristic patterns of functioning. Beneath behaviour there were personality traits or dispositions. Each person has a unique organisation of these traits. We often pick out cardinal traits to distinguish one person from another. Carol’s meanness might manifest itself in a number of different ways. It is an organising and orienting principle behind her way of being in the world. But Allport’s speculation about traits did not evolve along the path he himself had taken. It was instead taken up and adapted by psychometricians after World War 2. Raymond Cattell and Hans Eysenck separately developed trait theories that emphasised not dynamic organisation of traits within individuals, but differences between them. Using the technique of factor analysis, they studied personality in the way that others before them had IQ. Factor analysis takes the data from thousands of questionnaires and looks for dimensions along which it can be arranged. The debate between Eysenck and Cattell was about what level of abstraction to best describe individual differences in personality. Cattell was committed to the use of 16 factors and Eysenck to two (and later, three). Currently, psychometricians generally opt for something in between: five. But what is not in doubt is the picture of personality that emerges from these sorts of trait theory. It never attempts to make sense of any individual person’s actions. There is no attempt to describe the richness of the dynamic pattern of behaviours that make people unique. Advocates of this approach insist that the only scientific approach to personality must confine itself to dealing in core differences between individuals.

It was Walter Mischel who launched the most devastating critique of trait theories in 1968. Mischel had studied at Ohio State University with George Kelly. He argued that the scientific status of trait theories was in fact much weaker than it appeared. When filling in the questionnaires that are used to measure traits, individuals are asked to make hasty generalisations about their behaviour. This is very different from how they would actually act in circumstances where complex and subtle situational factors come into play. In his account of the power of situational variables, he drew on behavioural and cognitive experimental psychology to advocate what came to be called ‘social learning theory’. The fact remains though, that people do make systematic generalisations about their behaviour. Why is this? Because, Mischel claimed, questionnaires do assess something, even if it is not trait-like entities that exist behind behaviour. What they do assess is a person’s theory about, or image of himself. When you are asked if you would rather read a book than go to a party, or if you often have headaches, your answer is based on your impression of yourself. It is not usually founded in a record of how often you have done things (and what exactly does ‘often’ mean anyway?). But if this is what questionnaires indeed do, it would be better to use measures that are designed explicitly to get at a person’s theory about himself – such as the personal construct methods devised by Kelly and his colleagues.

Psychometricians’ understanding of personality is no use at all to clinicians. Knowing that Tim is definitely more anxious than most people, and certainly thinks of himself as pretty sociable when compared to the average man might be vaguely interesting but not all that relevant when we are wondering how to help him with his obsessional problems. How he compares to others is not the point. The psychotherapist wants to know exactly what he is anxious about, how things appear to him, and what forms his obsessions take. People go for psychotherapeutic help when they feel they cannot cope with life, not when they judge themselves to be two standard deviations above the mean score in a personality test. It is precisely those things that Eysenck and Cattell ruled out of the scientific study of personality that are of central interest to the clinician.¹ And so clinicians worked with their own types of personality theory, ones which they had found useful in their attempts to help people to change or come to terms with life.

At about the same time that Binet was working on IQ tests, Freud was developing psychoanalysis.² This incorporated both a method of treatment and a theory of human development that supported it. Medicine had become a high status profession at the end of the nineteenth century, and its new branch of psychiatry was in the business of re-defining lunacy and madness as a form of illness – mental illness. Doctors like Freud developed their own forms of psychology in order to explain the neuroses (the milder and less disabling types of ‘mental illness’). Of course, these neuroses, as well as the developmental speculations that were supposed to explain them, were described as discoveries rather than constructions. Evidence came from a series of individual case studies. The fruit of these constructions was that psychoanalysts (those clinicians trained in the Freudian tradition) found them useful in the treatment of their patients. Psychoanalytic theory formed the bedrock on which the treatment was based. The contrast between behaviourism and psychoanalysis could hardly be more stark. Behaviourism was sterile and laboratory based. It focused on observables – surface behaviour. Psychoanalysis was speculative and came out of the clinic. It was about depth, buried impulses and taboo-ridden bodies.

Psychotherapy in the dustbowl

Imagine the position in which George Kelly found himself in 1931. His PhD in psychology had focused on aphasia and physiological psychological accounts of it, a very specialist area in educational psychology. He had now got a job in Fort Hayes College in Kansas. His work entailed providing a psychological service for the schools in western Kansas. This was a huge area that he covered in a travelling clinic, along with his few students. These were pioneering days in psychology, and Kelly was used to the pioneering attitude – his own family had been one of the last to move west in a covered wagon. Guidelines and job descriptions were not prescribed like they are today. His work developed into what he later described as the ‘heart-breaking tasks of the psychotherapist’ with both children and adults. Heartbreaking it would surely have been. The USA was in the grip of the Great Depression that had followed the collapse of the stock markets in 1929. Kansas itself was soon to become what was to be called a ‘dustbowl’. Intensive farming and the changes in the landscape it involved resulted in the winds tearing away the topsoil in which crops grew. The droughts of the early 1930s exacerbated the situation. The agriculture on which the local economy was based collapsed. There were no health or social security safety nets. Starvation and poverty were everywhere. This was the background for Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath drama. A whole population uprooted and prepared to do anything for food.

What resources were available to the budding psychotherapist? The orthodox psychology of behaviourism and the parallel psychological universe of Freudian psychoanalysis were the only options. Kelly says nothing about psychometrics. Its rather sterile offerings were as yet two decades into the future. Not surprisingly, Kelly could make little sense of Freud. He read it with ‘a mounting feeling of incredulity that anyone could write such nonsense, much less publish it’.³ This surely tells us of the enormous culture gap between the two men. Freud had been raised in cosmopolitan Vienna in the closing days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had experienced the tragedies of the First World War at first hand. He had lost dear friends and relatives. Austria’s economy had collapsed and he had conducted analyses in exchange for bags of vegetables. Anti-Semitism was already sweeping Europe. In so many ways, the hopes of the modernist thinkers like him were being dashed. Small wonder that he wrote of depression, the death instinct and self-destructive impulses. Kelly came from the rural south-western United States. The Civil War had badly effected Kansas, but was 70 years in the past. Until the Great Depression, the USA’s economy had been booming. The pioneering spirit was encouraged. The idea of the unconscious, a current running throughout European literature, was absent. The prevailing philosophy was not the existentialism of Nietzsche, but the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey (see chapter 2). Psychoanalysis was built on reflection and a focus on history. Kelly’s social world stressed action and a vision of the future.

But if psychoanalysis gave K...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Issues in Personality
• 2 A Pragmatic Approach
• 3 Personal Construction and Meaning
• 4 A New Humanism
• 5 The Problem of Choice
• 6 Psychological Change and Reconstruction
• 7 The Unconscious and Human Destructiveness
• 8 A Psychology of Understanding
• Further Reading
• Index