The Wiley Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology

David A. Winter, Nick Reed, David A. Winter, Nick Reed

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781119121220, 9781118508312
• eBook ISBN: 9781118508299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Wiley Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology is the definitive new reference for the field, providing a state-of-the-art review of PCP which focuses on the theory and its philosophy, methodology, areas of application and future horizons

• A definitive new reference work for the field of personal construct psychology, featuring leading international figures in the field
• Each section begins with a concise chapter that reviews the literature in  the area concerned and highlights  new developments
• Covers theory, history, methodology and a wealth of new and established applications including education, grief and meaning reconstruction, sexuality, organizational consultancy and personal construct coaching
• Draws on published and previously unpublished work by pioneers including Fay Fransella and Miller Mair

1
What Is a Personal Construct?

Fay Fransella

At its simplest, a construct is a jargon term embedded centrally within George Kelly’s (1955) personal construct theory. It is the unit of his theory and that which is commonly thought to be measured in some form of repertory grid. It is a porthole through which we peer to make sense of the events swirling about us. One property of a construct is bipolarity. I am therefore going to start by telling you two things I think a construct is NOT before telling you what I think it is—that is, I am going to start by defining its opposite pole.

What a Construct Is NOT

Constructs are not concepts

However, they’re not totally different. A construct does share some similarities with a concept. Both are concerned with similarity between things—cups, for instance—which make them different from other things. Both involve the notion of abstraction.

But who says which things are similar and thereby different from others? There is a not always implicit notion that things really are different and that a concept is a property of things as they really are. In contrast, a construct is something that is created by an individual, personally. Its reality exists, not in the things themselves, but in the interpretative act of the individual person.

Whereas a concept is a way in which cups are alike and thereby different from all other things, a construct is a way in which cups are alike in contrast to some other things. The concept of “cups” is different from the concept of “saucers.” Thus the opposite of “cups” is “not cups.” The construct of “cups” may well have an opposite which is “saucers.” The opposite of a construct is not irrelevance but is a matter of contrast. It is one of the assumptions of personal construct theory that people think in terms of contrast. This notion of bipolarity is central in personal construct counseling, as we shall see.

A construct is not a rule

In spite of what Theodore Mischel wrote in his 1964 paper entitled “Personal Constructs, Rules and the Logic of Clinical Activity,” constructs are not rules. As Tschudi (1983) pointed out, Mischel’s argument that constructs are rules and that Kelly’s attempt to promote them as predictive devices is invalid is, itself, invalid. The arguments are complex and cannot be covered with justice within this talk.

An essential feature of a construct is that it is the basis of our predictions about ourselves in relation to our world. As I shall emphasize later, personal construct counseling and therapy is based on the fundamental premise that change can only come about if a person is able to find alternative ways of construing—and thereby predicting—the problem situation. The person has to reconstrue.

Constructs are not rules and they are not concepts

What a Construct IS

So, what are constructs? I want to mention 10 main features that define a construct for me.

It is an abstraction

First, a construct is an abstraction. It is a way in which an individual makes sense of events and the world. We abstract our OWN meanings from the swirl of events confronting us and thereby impose our OWN meanings on the world. Constructs are indeed personal.

It is bipolar

Second, a construct is bipolar. It is a way of discriminating between things, events, people. It is a way in which some things are seen as being the same and by that same token as different from others—it consists of two poles. It makes more psychological sense to point to a window and say “That is not a door” than to point to a leaf and say “That is not a door.” Constructs are pathways of movement. We may not find it too exciting to move from seeing something as a door to seeing it as a window—unless of course we want to walk through it—but it makes a big difference to a woman to move from seeing herself as an unattractive fat slob to being a slim attractive female.

A knowledge of what a client construes as being the opposite of a course of action or self-perception is vital for the counselor or anyone trying to understand themselves or others. Only then can we glimpse possible answers to such questions as “What is that person NOT doing by doing what he IS doing?” Or, “What are the penalties involved in moving from being a fat slob to being an attractive slim woman?” Something is preventing change—what is it? The answer often lies at the contrast end of the construing.

It is linked to fellow constructs

I have been guilty of distorting the theory of personal constructs somewhat by forcing myself to talk as if “the construct” exists alone, as a discrete entity. It is not and does not. A third feature of a construct is that it is linked in a hierarchical structure. It is through this hierarchical structure that we view and experience the world.

This notion of hierarchy is used when trying to understand the relative importance of issues. The procedure of “laddering” is vital here (Hinkle, 1965). This helps the person spell out the ways in which they construe the world at higher and higher levels of abstraction. These superordinate personal constructs are the mainsprings of our existence. As Hinkle and others have shown, the higher, the more abstract, the more superordinate a construct is, the more it is likely to resist change. This enables an explanation to be given, for example, as to why it is that a manager is failing in his current job. The job has changed from being one in which the essence of being a good manager is to ensure that everyone does what they are supposed to do, to a new style of facilitative management, where caring for and interest in the individual are paramount.

The counselor may find that the manager construes himself as someone who must always have control of his world—loss of control threatens him with personal chaos. Providing an environment in which staff can work at their best means loss of control over events—control is handed over to others.

No wonder he has problems. He is being asked to behave in a way that is foreign to him. He can no longer predict his own behavior let alone that of others. In such a situation the manager might find his current experiences of the world intolerable. He may construe his feelings as indicating he is “unwell.” Perhaps he sees himself as—or someone else says he is—depressed. He comes to the counselor with “depression.” The personal construct counselor will regard this symptom from the theoretical perspective that it is “a way of giving meaning to otherwise chaotic experiences.”

Constructs are used at different levels of awareness

As well as talking as if constructs were discrete units—which they are not—I have been talking as if all constructs are available in conscious awareness. My fourth point is that they are not. The level at which we are operating here is highly cognitive. But that manager did not consciously “decide” to “be depressed.”

If you were now to redirect your focus of attention—if you have not done so already—to what else you are experiencing, you may find visceral or autonomic sensations which you construe as indicating that you are annoyed, excited, anxious, or just plain bored. Your constructs are operating at nonverbal levels of awareness. Our guts often tell us that we do not like a stranger long before we have consciously worked out why. Sometimes our behavior remains a puzzle to us for a long time—perhaps some people here still have behaviors that they do not really understand. This would suggest nonverbal construing at work. Our constructs, at whatever level we are using them to make sense of the world, link directly to our behavior.

A construct is the basis of anticipation and prediction

Fifth, when we interpret (construe) a situation in a certain way, we are thereby making predictions about what will come next.

The meaning of the construct is embedded in the theory’s Fundamental Postulate and its first elaborative corollary to do with construction. These state that a person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which they anticipate events and that we anticipate events by construing their replications. We look at the undifferentiated flow of events before us and note that something repeats itself. We abstract the nature of these observed replications in events and note how these differ from others. We have formed a construct. By noting an event as something that is being repeated, we are able to predict the future course of events.

At a simple level, I may construe my pain in the head as a headache. I may move on from that and say “If you have a headache, take an aspirin because they are good for headaches.” That may look like Mischel’s rule, but a prediction is involved—“My headache will get better if I take an aspirin.”

Constructs are ways of controlling our world

Sixth, the better able we are to predict our world, the more control we have over it. Kelly says:

Constructs are the channels in which one’s mental processes run. They are two-way streets along which one may travel to reach conclusions. They make it possible to anticipate the changing tide of events . . . constructs are the controls that one places upon life—the life within him as well as the life which is external to him.

(Kelly, 1955, p. 126)

Control over our personal worlds comes with the abi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 What Is a Personal Construct?
• Part I: Personal Construct Psychology and Its Philosophy
• Part II: Methodology
• Part III: Society and Culture
• Part IV: Clinical Applications
• Part V: Organizational Applications
• Part VI: Educational Applications
• Part VII: New Horizons
• Appendix Personal Construct Theory
• Index
• End User License Agreement