Personal Construct Psychology

Kelly’s fundamental postulate: a person’s processes are psychologically channelised by the ways in which they anticipate events. We are not driven by drives or shaped by reinforcement; we are in the business of prediction, and we construct personal theories to do it.

Constructs are bipolar — meaning is created by contrast, and knowing what someone means by "strong" requires knowing what they oppose it to. For one person the contrast is "weak"; for another it is "gentle", which is an entirely different construct with entirely different implications.

Constructive alternativism

Kelly’s core philosophical position: no event has only one possible interpretation, and any construction can be replaced by a better one.

Core constructs

Those governing identity and existence. Threat is the awareness of imminent comprehensive change in them.

Anxiety

The awareness that events lie outside the range of one’s construct system — not fear of something, but the absence of any way to construe it.

Hostility

Continuing to extort confirmation for a prediction that has already failed.

Guilt

Awareness of dislodgement from one’s core role structure — behaving in a way inconsistent with who one takes oneself to be.

Disorder is the repeated use of a construction despite consistent invalidation. The person is a scientist who has stopped running experiments — either because the outcome is too threatening, or because their system has no alternative available.

1. 1Elicit the construct system, usually with a repertory grid or laddering.
2. 2Identify where the system fails to predict, and where it is being held rigid.
3. 3Loosen construing where it is over-tight; tighten it where it is too loose.
4. 4Elaborate alternatives — new constructs, or new ways of applying existing ones.
5. 5Test them behaviourally, in the world.