GEORGE KELLY & ALTERNATIVE CONSTRUCTIVISM

Especially dedicated to my psychologist friends, Caitlin, Carla-Maria, Chloe, Michelle Anne Paigey and Nina Muslim.

George Kelly
George Kelly was teaching physiological psychology at Fort Hays Kansas State College in 1931, at the time of the dust bowl and the depression. Recognizing the pains and sorrows of the farming families of the area, he decided to develop a rural clinical service. This was hardly a money-making operation as many of his clients had no money. Some couldn't come to him, and so he and his students would travel, sometimes for hours, to them.

At first, Kelly used standard Freudian techniques. He had these folks lie down on a couch, free associate, and tell him their dreams. When he saw resistances or symbols of sexual and aggressive needs, he would patiently convey his impressions to them. He was surprised by how readily these relatively unsophisticated people took to these explanations of their problems. Surely, given their culture, the standard Freudian interpretations should seem terribly bizarre? Apparently, they placed their faith in him, the professional.

Kelly himself, however, found these standard Freudian explanations a bit far-fetched, and inappropriate to the lives of Kansan farm families. So, as time went by, he noticed that his interpretations were becoming increasingly unorthodox. In fact, he began "making up" explanations! His clients listened as carefully as before, believed in him as much as ever, and improved at the same slow but steady pace.

It began to occur to him that what truly mattered to these people was that they had an explanation of their difficulties, that they had a way of understanding them. What mattered was that the "chaos" of their lives developed some order. And he discovered that, while just about any order and understanding that came from an authority was accepted gladly, order and understanding that came out of their own lives, their own culture, was even better.

Out of these insights, Kelly developed his theory and philosophy. He called the philosophy constructive alternativism. Constructive alternativism is the idea that, while there is only one true reality, reality is always experienced from one or another perspective, or alternative construction. I have a construction, you have one, a person on the other side of the planet has one, someone living long ago had one, a primitive person has one, a modern scientist has one, every child has one, even someone who is seriously mentally ill has one.

Some constructions are better than others. Yet no-one's construction is ever complete--the world is just too complicated, too big, for anyone to have the perfect perspective. And no-one's perspective is ever to be completely ignored. Each perspective is, in fact, a perspective on the ultimate reality, and has some value to that person in that time and place.

In fact, Kelly says, there are an infinite number of alternative constructions one may take towards the world, and if ours is not doing a very good job, we can take another!

Kelly's Theory
Kelly's theory begins with what he called his "fruitful metaphor." He had noticed long before that scientists, and therapists, often displayed a peculiar attitude towards people: While they thought quite well of themselves, they tended to look down on their subjects or clients. While they saw themselves as engaged in the fine arts of reason and empiricism, they tended to see ordinary people as the victims of their sexual energies or conditioning histories. But Kelly, with his experience with Kansan students and farm people, noted that these ordinary people, too, were engaged in science; they, too, were trying to understand what was going on.

So people--ordinary people--are scientists, too. The have constructions of their reality, like scientists have theories. They have anticipations or expectations, like scientists have hypotheses. They engage in behaviors that test those expectations, like scientists do experiments. They improve their understandings of reality on the bases of their experiences, like scientists adjust their theories to fit the facts. From this metaphor comes Kelly's entire theory.

The fundamental postulate
Kelly organized his theory into a fundamental postulate and 11 corollaries. His fundamental postulate says this:

"A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events."

(This and all subsequent quotations are from Kelly's 1955 The Psychology of Personal Constructs.)

This is the central movement in the scientific process: from hypothesis to experiment or observation, i.e. from anticipation to experience and behavior.

By processes, Kelly means your experiences, thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and whatever might be left over. All these things are determined, not just by the reality out there, but by your efforts to anticipate the world, other people, and yourself, from moment to moment as well as day-to-day and year-to-year.

So, when I look out of my window to find the source of some high-pitched noises, I don't just see exactly and completely what is out there. I see that which is in keeping with my expectations. I am ready for birds, perhaps, or children laughing and playing. I am not prepared for a bulldozer that operates with a squeal rather than the usual rumbling, or for a flying saucer landing in my yard. If a UFO were in fact the source of the high-pitched noises, I would not truly perceive it at first. I'd perceive something. I'd be confused and frightened. I'd try to figure out what I'm looking at. I'd engage in all sorts of behaviors to help me figure it out, or to get me away from the source of my anxiety! Only after a bit would I be able to find the right anticipation, the right hypothesis: "Oh my God, it's a UFO!"

If, of course, UFO's were a commonplace occurrence in my world, upon hearing high-pitched noises I would anticipate birds, kids, or a UFO, an anticipation that could then be quickly refined with a glance out of the window.

The 11 corollaries are:
1. The construction corollary
2. The experience corollary
3. The dichotomy corollary
4. The organization corollary
5. The range corollary
6. The modulation corollary
7. The choice corollary
8. The individuality corollary
9. The commonality corollary
10. The fragmentation corollary
11. The sociality corollary

Feelings
The theory so far presented may sound very cognitive, with all its emphasis on constructs and constructions, and many people have said so as their primary criticism of Kelly's theory. In fact, Kelly disliked being called a cognitive theorist. He felt that his "professional constructs" included the more traditional ideas of perception, behavior, and emotion, as well as cognition. So to say he doesn't talk about emotions, for example, is to miss the point altogether.

What you and I would call emotions (or affect, or feelings) Kelly called constructs of transition, because they refer to the experiences we have when we move from one way of looking at the world or ourselves to another.

When you are suddenly aware that your constructs aren't functioning well, you feel anxiety. You are (as Kelly said) "caught with your constructs down." It can be anything from your chequebook not balancing, to forgetting someone's name during introductions, to an unexpected hallucinogenic trip, to forgetting your own name. When anticipations fail, you feel anxiety. If you've taken a social psychology course, you might recognize the concept as being very similar to cognitive dissonance.

When the anxiety involves anticipations of great changes coming to your core constructs—the ones of greatest importance to you—it becomes threat. For example, you are not feeling well. You think it might be something serious. You go to the doctor. He looks. He shakes his head. He looks again. He gets solemn. He calls in a colleague... This is "threat." We also feel it when we graduate, get married, become parents for the first time, when roller coasters leave the track, and during therapy.

When you do things that are not in keeping with your core constructs--with your idea of who you are and how you should behave--you feel guilt. This is a novel and useful definition of guilt, because it includes situations that people know to be guilt-ridden and yet don't meet the usual criterion of being in some way immoral. If your child falls into a manhole, it may not be your fault, but you will feel guilty, because it violates your belief that it is your duty as a parent to prevent accidents like this. Similarly, children often feel guilty when a parent gets sick, or when parents divorce. And when a criminal does something out of character, something the rest of the world might consider good, he feels guilty about it!

We have talked a lot about adapting to the world when our constructs don't match up with reality, but there is another way: You can try to make reality match up with your constructs. Kelly calls this aggression. It includes aggression proper: If someone insults my tie, I can punch his lights out, in which case I can wear my tie in peace. But it also includes things we might today prefer to call assertiveness: Sometimes things are not as they should be, and we should change them to fit our ideals. Without assertiveness, there would be no social progress!

Again, when our core constructs are on the line, aggression may become hostility. Hostility is a matter of insisting that your constructs are valid, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Examples might include an elderly boxer still claiming to be "the greatest," a nerd who truly believes he's a Don Juan, or a person in therapy who desperately resists acknowledging that there even is a problem.

Psychopathology and Therapy
This brings us nicely to Kelly's definition of a psychological disorder:

"Any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation."

The behaviors and thoughts of neurosis, depression, paranoia, schizophrenia, etc., are all examples. So are patterns of violence, bigotry, criminality, greed, addiction, and so on. The person can no longer anticipate well, yet can't seem to learn new ways of relating to the world. He or she is loaded with anxiety and hostility, is unhappy and is making everyone else unhappy, too.

If a person's problem is poor construction, then the solution should be reconstruction, a term Kelly was tempted to use for his style of therapy. Psychotherapy involves getting the client to reconstrue, to see things in a different way, from a new perspective, one that allows the choices that lead to elaboration.

Kellian therapists essentially ask their clients to join them in a series of experiments concerning the clients' life styles. They may ask their clients to loosen their constructs, to slip them around, to test them, to tighten them up again, to "try them on for size." The intent is to encourage movement, essential for any progress.

Kelly, with his background in drama, liked to use role-playing (or enactment) to encourage movement. He might take the part of your mother and have you express your feelings. After a while, he might ask you to reverse roles with him—you be your mother, and he'll be you! In this way, you become aware of your own construction of your relationship and your mother's construction. Perhaps you will begin to understand her, or see ways in which you might adapt. You may come to a compromise, or discover an entirely new perspective that rises above both.

Kelly's therapy often involves home-work, things he would ask you to do outside the therapy situation. His best-known technique is called fixed-role therapy. First, he asks you for a description of yourself, a couple of pages in the third person, which he calls the character sketch. Then he constructs, perhaps with the help of a colleague, another description, called the fixed-role sketch, of a pretend person.

He writes this sketch by examining your original sketch carefully and using constructs that are "at right angles" to the constructs you used. This means that the new constructs are independent of the original ones, but they are used in a similar way, that is, they refer to the same range of elements.

If, for example, I use genius-idiot as a construct in dealing with people, I don't give them a lot of room to be somewhere in between, and I don't allow much for change. And, since we use the same constructs on ourselves as we use for others, I don't give myself much slack either. On a really good day, I might call myself a genius. On most days, I'd have no choice, if I used such a dramatic construct, but to call myself an idiot. And idiots stay idiots; they don't turn into geniuses. So, I'd be setting myself up for depression, not to mention for a life with very few friends.

Kelly might write a fixed-role sketch with a construct like skilled-unskilled. This is a much more "humane" construct than genius-idiot. It is much less judgmental: A person can, after all, be skilled in one area, yet unskilled in another. And it allows for change: If I find that I am unskilled in some area of importance, I can, with a little effort, become skilled.

Anyway, Kelly would then ask his client to be the person described in the fixed-role sketch for a week or two. Mind you, this is a full time commitment: He wants you to be this person 24 hours a day, at work, at home, even when you're alone. Kelly found that most people are quite good at this, and even enjoy it. After all, this person is usually much healthier than they are!

Should the client come back and say "Thank you, doc! I believe I'm cured. All I need to do now is be "Dave" instead of "George" for the rest of my life," Kelly would have a surprise in store: He might ask that person to play another fixed-role for a couple of weeks, one that might not be so positive. That's because the intent of this play-acting is not that the therapist give you a new personality. That would quickly come to nothing. The idea is to show you that you do, in fact, have the power to change, to "choose yourself."

Kellian therapy has, as its goal, opening people up to alternatives, helping them to discover their freedom, allowing them to live up to their potentials. For this reason, and many others, Kelly fits most appropriately among the humanistic psychologists.

Assessment
Perhaps the thing most associated with George Kelly is his role construct repertory test, which most people now call the rep grid. Not a test in the traditional sense at all, it is a diagnostic, self-discovery, and research tool that has actually become more famous than the rest of his theory.

First, the client names a set of ten to twenty people, called elements, likely to be of some importance to the person's life. In therapy, these people are named in response to certain suggestive categories, such as "past lover" and "someone you pity," and would naturally include yourself, your mother and father, and so on.

The therapist or researcher then picks out three of these at a time, and asks you to tell him or her which of the three are similar, and which one is different. And he asks you to give him something to call the similarity and the difference. The similarity label is called the similarity pole, and the difference one is called the contrast pole, and together they make up one of the constructs you use in social relations. If, for example, you say that you and your present lover are both nervous people, but your former lover was very calm, then nervous is the similarity pole and calm the contrast pole of the construct nervous-calm.

You continue in this fashion, with different combinations of three, until you get about twenty contrasts listed. By eyeballing the list, or by performing certain statistical operations on a completed chart, the list might be narrowed down to ten or so contrasts by eliminating overlaps: Often, our constructs , even though they have different words attached to them, are used in the same way. Nervous-calm, for example, may be used exactly like you use neurotic-healthy or jittery-passive.

In diagnosis and self-discovery uses, you are, of course, encouraged to use constructs that refer to people's behaviors and personalities. But in research uses, you may be asked to give any kind of constructs at all, and you may be asked to give them in response to all sorts of elements. In industrial psychology, for example, people have been asked to compare and contrast various products (for marketing analyses), good and bad examples of a product (for quality control analyses), or different leadership styles. You can find your musical style constructs this way, or your constructs about political figures, or the constructs you use to understand personality theories.

In therapy, the rep grid gives the therapist and the client a picture of the client's view of reality that can be discussed and worked with. In marriage therapy, two people can work on the grid with the same set of elements, and their constructs compared and discussed. It isn't sacred: The rep grid is rare among "tests" in that the client is invited to change his or her mind about it at any time. Neither is it assumed to be a complete picture of a person's mental state. It is what it is: a diagnostic tool.

In research, we can take advantage of a number of computer programs that allow for a "measurement" of the distances between constructs or between elements. We get a picture, created by the people themselves, of their world-views. We can compare the views of several people (as long as they use the same elements). We can compare a person's world-view before and after training, or therapy. It is an exciting tool, an unusual combination of the subjective and objective side of personality research.

Discussion
Kelly published The Psychology of Personal Constructs in 1955. After a brief flurry of interest (and considerable criticism), he and his theory were pretty much forgotten, except by a few loyal students, most of whom were involved more in their clinical practices than in the advancement of the psychology of personality. Curiously, his theory continued to have a modest notoriety in England, particularly among industrial psychologists.

The reasons for this lack of attention are not hard to fathom: The "science" branch of psychology was at that time still rather mired in a behaviorist approach to psychology that had little patience with the subjective side of things; And the clinical side of psychology found people like Carl Rogers much easier to follow. Kelly was a good 20 years ahead of his time. Only recently, with the so-called "cognitive revolution," are people really ready to understand him.

It is ironic that George Kelly, always true to his philosophy of constructive alternativism, felt that, if his theory were still around in ten or twenty years, in a form significantly like the original, there would be cause for concern. Theories, like our individual views of reality, should change, not remain static.

There are legitimate criticisms. First, although Kelly is a very good writer, he chose to reinvent psychology from the ground up, introducing a new set of terms and a new set of metaphors and images. And he went out of his way to avoid being associated with other approaches to the field. This inevitably alienated him from the mainstream.

In a more positive vein, some of the words he invented are now firmly fixed in mainstream psychology (although many still think of them as "trendy!"): Anticipation has been made popular by the famous cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser; Construct, construction, construal, and all its variations can be found in books and articles right alongside of words like perception and behavior. Sadly, Kelly, just like other innovators, seldom gets any credit for his innovations, mostly because psychologists are rarely trained to pay much attention to where ideas come from.

The "rep grid" has also become quite popular, especially since computers have made it much easier to use. As I mentioned before, it is a nice blend of the qualitative and the introspective that even critics of Kelly's overall theory have a hard time finding fault with.

Connections
Much of Personal Construct Theory is phenomenological. Kelly acknowledged his sympathies with the phenomenological theories of Carl Rogers, Donald Snygg and Arthur Combs, and the "self-theorists" Prescott Lecky and Victor Raimy. But he was skeptical of phenomenology per se. Like so many people, he assumed that phenomenology was some kind of introspective idealism. As we shall see in later chapters, that is a mistaken assumption.

But a phenomenologist would find much of Kelly's theory quite congenial. For example, Kelly believes that to understand behavior you need to understand how the person construes reality—i.e. how he or she understands it, perceives it—more than what that reality truly is. In fact, he points out that everyone's view—even the hard-core scientist's—is just that: a view. And yet he also notes, emphatically, that there is no danger here of solipsism (the idea that the world is only my idea), because the view has to be of something. This is exactly the meaning of the phenomenologist's basic principle, known as intentionality.

On the other hand, there are aspects of Kelly's theory that are not so congenial to phenomenology. First, he was a true theory-builder, and the technical detail of his theory shows it. Phenomenologists, on the other hand, tend to avoid theory. Second, he had high hopes for a rigorous methodology for psychology—even using the experimental scientist as his "fruitful metaphor." Most phenomenologists are much more skeptical about experimentation.

The emphasis on theory-building, fine detail, and the hope for a rigorous methodology do make Kelly very appealing to modern cognitive psychologists. Time will tell whether Kelly will be remembered as a phenomenologist or a cognitivist!

Readings
The basic reference for George Kelly is the two volume Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955). The first three chapters are available in paperback as A Theory of Personality (1963). Kelly wrote a number of very interesting articles as well; most of these are collected into Clinical Psychology and Personality: Selected papers of George Kelly, edited by Brendan Maher (1969).



This essay is an abridged version of the original written by
Dr. C. George Boeree
Psychology Department
Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania
available at:
http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/kelly.html

It has been created for undergraduate and graduate courses in Personality Theories. While it is copyrighted, you may download it or print it out without permission from the author, as long as the material is used only for personal or educational purposes, and the source is indicated.