Personal Construct Counselling in Action

Fay Fransella, Peggy Dalton

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780761966159, 9780761966142
• eBook ISBN: 9781446234013
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Praise for the First Edition

`In Britain, few people can have contributed more to the development of a personal construct approach than Fay Fransella and Peggy Dalton.... Their book is primarily written for those who may wish to incorporate Kelly?s ideas into their existing counselling framework.... This is an informative book which is concise, well-written and with no shortage of clinical examples, relevant to all who are interested in counselling and psychotherapy? - British Journal of Psychology

The revised and updated edition of this practical, accessible book gives a clear introduction to personal construct counselling for counselling trainees and practitioners alike. Outlining the key principles of the personal construct approach to counselling and relating them to practice, the book carefully explores ways in which counsellors, through credulous listening to everything the client says - and does not say - can build the client?s awareness of the manner in which he or she construes problems. The range of methods that can be used to help the counsellor and client learn more about inherent contradictions and their implications, are described and illustrated.

The book goes on to show how the counsellor and client in partnership can then devise experiments for change through which the client can try out new and more rewarding ways of constructing and acting. A number of approaches to facilitating change are discussed and exemplified.

1

THE IDEAS BEHIND THE ACTION

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It is of fundamental importance to understand that personal construct theory is not a theory of counselling. It is a theory that George Kelly proposed in 1955 to explain how you and I go about the business of trying to make sense of the world in which we live. It is, in fact, not so much a theory as a total psychology of human understanding and experiencing. It is total in that it suggests we look for explanations of all behaviours, feelings, motivations, learnings, experiences and whatever else besides, within each person.

This approach to human understanding involves looking for explanations of someone else’s behaviour by putting oneself in that person’s shoes and looking at the world through that person’s eyes. For instance, on occasion we may seem to lack ‘motivation’. But that is usually someone else’s view – we are not doing what they think we should be doing.

Most of us have a tendency to explain other people’s behaviour from our own vantage point. When we call someone aggressive we do not always ask ourselves what that person thinks he or she is doing. We look at the behaviour and that is enough – we interpret it in our own terms. But for Kelly, the explanation has to be sought from within that ‘aggressive’ person.

Another starting point for our understanding of ourselves and others is the basic assumption that we are all constantly on the move, never stopping. If this is our starting point then we do not have to concern ourselves with what ‘motivates’ or ‘drives’ people. Each one of us is acting upon the world rather than reacting to it.

In order to be able to offer a way of looking at the totality of human experience, Kelly had to pitch his ideas at a very abstract level. This leaves us the task of filling in the content – as you will soon see. To help gain a better understanding of personal construct theory and its measuring technique, which has come to be called the repertory grid, we need to take a glimpse at the person who wrote the theory.

A PERSONAL HISTORY: GEORGE A. KELLY

George A. Kelly was born in 1905, published his Psychology of Personal Constructs in the United States of America in 1955 and died in 1967. He did not start out to be a psychologist but rather, in his young days, saw himself as an engineer. His first degree in 1926 was a Bachelor’s in physics and mathematics. From there he moved on to a Master’s degree in educational sociology and then to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he took a Bachelor of Education degree. In his ‘Autobiography of a theory’ (1969a) he talks of the four years leading up to his Doctor of Philosophy degree (on stuttering) thus:

I taught soap-box oratory in a labor college for labor organizers, government in an Americanization institute for prospective citizens, public speaking for the American Bankers’ Association, and dramatics in a junior college … I had taken a Master’s degree with a study of workers’ use of leisure time, and an advanced professional degree in education at the University of Edinburgh, and … I had dabbled academically in education, sociology, labor relations, biometrics, speech pathology, and cultural anthropology. (Kelly, 1969a: 48)

In the early 1930s, Kelly went to the Fort Hays State University in Kansas. Here, apart from teaching psychology to the undergraduates and doing the other things university teachers do, he became particularly involved in developing clinical training programmes for psychologists. The most remarkable feature of this period was the start of his travelling clinics. These were set up to identify the problems of school children and to make recommendations for dealing with those problems.

Kansas is a large state and a typical schedule for Kelly and his four or five students would be a 3.00 a.m. start so as to be ready to work on site at 8.00 a.m. at a school within that state. Up to twelve children would be seen each day and given a very comprehensive physical and psychological examination. While the tests were being administered by his students, Kelly would give a public lecture followed by time for questions. After lunch, until early evening they would be immersed in case conferences at which they would decide what recommendations to make about each child. These recommendations were then given to parents and teachers after dinner. Zelhart and Thomas (1983), who give us these early facts about Kelly and his travelling clinic, comment that ‘a unique feature of the clinics was a 2-year follow-up by mail’.

The origins of repertory grid technique (see Chapter 4) as it exists today are rooted in this early time. By the early 1940s he had outlined ‘fixed role therapy’. The development of his theory, the ‘psychology of personal constructs’, was under way.

George Kelly worked for the navy during the Second World War as an aviation psychologist and was involved in pilot training. Soon after the war ended he was appointed Professor and Director of Clinical Psychology at Ohio State University. During the twenty years he was to remain there he published his two-volume work.

There is a story (Maher, 1985) that he never expected any publisher to take an interest in his work. But, under some unknown internal pressure, he decided he should at least test this out, so he and his group of clinical students put twenty manuscripts of the two volumes into twenty very large boxes. (There are over twelve hundred pages in the books and the manuscript was double spaced.) These were piled into a van and delivered to twenty publishers. To George Kelly’s enormous surprise, six of these publishers offered him contracts. Brendan Maher commented that he believes Kelly never really got over this error of judgement!

After the publication of his theory, Kelly was much sought after as a visiting teacher and lecturer. He travelled around the world talking about his theory and its applications. Yet the theory did not receive the immediate recognition within psychology which his personal acclaim might have led one to expect.

In 1965 he moved to Brandeis University where he died a year later leaving a book on The Human Feeling uncompleted. Many of the chapters drafted for this book have been gathered together in Clinical Psychology and Personality (Maher, 1969).

THE TWO ASPECTS OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS

The total approach can best be understood if we look at Kelly’s ideas ‘as if’ he actually wrote two theories. One theory is to do with how we, as individual human beings, experience our world; our loves and hates, ecstasies and depressions, anxieties and guilts. The other is the theoretical skeleton pitched at a very abstract level; this provides the framework for our understanding of our experiencing of events.

There is a vital driving force that permeates both these aspects of Kelly’s ideas – his philosophy.

The Philosophy Underlying the Theories

Kelly called his philosophy ‘constructive alternativism’. This is not as incomprehensible as it may at first sound. It basically means that we have ‘alternatives’ with which we can try to make sense of (or construe) each other, ourselves and the world swirling around us.

Constructive alternativism underlies all of Kelly’s theorising. It is very unusual for a psychological theory to have its philosophy spelled out like this. We let Kelly himself describe it:

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. (Kelly, 1986a: 1)

There are, of course, constraints. For example, we have all developed within specific social contexts and this has influenced the range of constructs we might usefully develop. The Eskimos (Inuits) may well have ten constructs to do with snow, most other people do not. We have never been confronted with enough examples of snow among which to make useful discriminations. We each have a construing system that has only a finite number of ways of viewing the world.

Kelly is not saying that any ways of construing are possible. When he says that there are always alternative ways of looking at any event, he is talking of potential. Give us enough experience of different sorts of snow and we may well find it useful to start to elaborate our ‘snow’ subsystem of constructs.

Many women’s groups focus precisely on this active elaboration of a construing subsystem. They attempt to make women conscious of their construing of themselves as women in the context of a man’s world. Women are often unaware of many of the ways in which their construing limits their freedom. And, by reconstruing, women may find alternative ways of looking at their roles.

The essential message for the personal construct counsellor is that change is always possible for any client. But that does not mean it is easy. It just means that we can be ever hopeful that our work with the client may open up as yet unexplored avenues. ‘No one needs to paint himself into a corner; no one needs to be completely hemmed in by circumstances; no one needs to be the victim of his biography’ (Kelly, 1955: 15; 1991: Vol. I, 11).

We Are Personal Scientists

What sort of person is this ‘him’ or ‘her’ and how can we stop being painted into a corner? Kelly did not see eye to eye with Freudian or behavioural theorists. One of the reasons was that he felt neither did justice to the striving and personal actions of each and every one of us. Not surprisingly with his background as a physicist, he asked what new insights we might get if we were to view each one of ourselves ‘as if’ we were all scientists. Not pushed and pulled by events but struggling to understand our world. Just as scientists do. This was very much in accord with his philosophy which states that no one person has direct access to the truth – each looks at the world from their own, personal perspective. There are always alternative ways of looking at events.

We are seen as scientists in that we have mini-theories about what confronts us in the world; we conduct experiments to test out hypotheses derived from these theories; and look to see whether we are more or less right or wrong. There is nothing in here to say that we will be ‘good’ scientists. In fact, many of our problems are the result of our conducting ‘poor’ experiments – poor for us as individuals and not poor against some external values. Shy young Kate can never face a public occasion without a stiff whisky to give her confidence. Everyone thinks she is charming and full of self-composure. But she knows that is not so. She is full of whisky. Her behavioural experiment is a success to outsiders, but serves her poorly. She never puts her ‘shyness’ to the test. Has she learned nothing? Would she really be so shy now without whisky to support her?

This model of the person as a scientist has a very radical feature tucked inside it. Normally speaking scientists conduct experiments to study the effects of certain ‘variables’ on behaviour. In Kelly’s model behaviour itself becomes an experiment. Behaviour is part of the process rather than the end product. We test out the rightness or wrongness of our own construing by putting it to the test – by behaving. Kate conducts the same behavioural experiment again and again, rather than the one that would allow her to move on – such as ‘can I now be confident without whisky?’

Kelly put the inquiring nature of behaviour like this:

Instead of being a problem of threatening proportions, requiring the utmost explanation and control to keep man out of trouble, behaviour presents itself as man’s principal instrument of inquiry. Without it his questions are academic and he gets nowhere. When it is prescribed for him he runs around in dogmatic circles. But when he uses it boldly to ask questions, a flood of unexpected answers rises to tax his utmost capacity to understand. (Kelly, 1986a: 5)

In Kelly’s theory all our behaviour is seen as testing out our construing. Most of the time we do not consciously think, ‘I am now going to walk on that surface which I construe as a floor.’ Implicitly, however, whenever we do walk on a floor we predict that it will be solid and immovable and will stand our weight. We also predict what it will not be: for instance, that it will not prove to be alive, nor make a loud noise. Of course, a great deal of our construing, particularly that concerning people, is much more easily invalidated and often takes place at a more conscious level. But it need not do so.

THE NATURE OF CONSTRUING

The psychology of personal constructs is a very complex and comprehensive psychological theoretical system described in very great detail. It is not our aim to submerge you in theoretical concepts for the sake of academic purity. But it is necessary to mention many of its theoretical ideas because the process of personal construct counselling is the process of understanding the client’s construing of the world as seen through the eyes of personal construct theory and, thereby, being in a position to facilitate the client’s reconstruing of life and experience.

Kelly sets out the bare bones of his theory in the form of an engineer’s blueprint. It has a Fundamental Postulate which is elaborated by eleven corollaries. Like a blueprint, every word of each is defined! An outline of these can be found in the book Inquiring Man (Bannister and Fransella, 1986) and in A Psychology for Living (Dalton and Dunnett, 1992).

The essence of any theory is stated in its fundamental postulate, and we use this to provide a deeper grasp of the essentials of the approach. The postulate states that a person’s processes are psychologically channelised by the ways in which we anticipate events. Its starting point is therefore the person. The theory may turn out to be useful in increasing our understanding of organisms, lower animals and societies. But they can wait. Kelly is talking about someone we think we know, or would like to know – such as you, or Peggy or Fay.

The person has processes that express themselves in what is often called ‘personality’. Kelly’s focus on process means there is no need for other notions such as dynamics, drives or motivation. Freud, for instance, had to propose the idea of ‘psychic energy’ to explain why we, essentially inert matter, do anything at all. Behaviourists talk of ‘drives’ to explain activity. Kelly’s starting point is that we are dealing with the person who...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Preface
• 1 THE IDEAS BEHIND THE ACTION
• 2 SETTING THE SCENE
• 3 THE FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES
• 4 EXPLORING THE CLIENT’S WORLD
• 5 COUNSELLING AS A PROCESS OF RECONSTRUCTION
• 6 THE PROCESS OF CHANGE FOR LISA
• 7 ENDING AND EVALUATING THE PROCESS OF PERSONAL CONSTRUCT COUNSELLING – AND BEYOND
• References
• Index