Construing contexts: problems and prospects of George Kelly's personal construct psychology

Kelly's concept of man is that of a scientist formulating hypotheses about the world and revising them in the light of their predictive utility. His position is one of subjective realism by which each of us interprets the world according to personal dimensions termed constructs. Establishing knowledge about how others construe the world is made possible in clinical situations by recourse to two Kellyan methods: the character sketch and the role construct repertory test. The former relies on clinical observation, the latter on statistical sophistication. This divergence in methods has led to an ideological split in the following that Kelly spawned, which need not, however, be a barrier to clinical research in this field. Although not all cognitive therapists are constructivists, they share with the latter the desire to look for core patterns underlying individual maladaptive thoughts and actions. Kelly's methods can be applied to the functional analysis favoured by cognitive behaviourists, with clinical gains resulting from the quicker access this provides to personal meaning. But cognitive psychology's schematic approach to organization is a challenge to Kelly's, which conceives of everyday experience solely in terms of the logical nature of construing. Some constraints and assumptions of Kelly's dialectical logic may be avoided by adopting a more phenomenological approach to construing.