Personal Construct Psychology as a Way of Life

Abstract

The utility of Fay Fransella's notion of the symptom as a way of life, and of the methodology that she used to demonstrate this, will be considered. It will be argued that personal construct psychology was her way of life. As indicated in her work on threat and the scientist, challenge to such a way of life will be threatening. These notions will be used to explain Fransella's views concerning constructivism and its relationship to personal construct psychology.

Notes

1. “A person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system” (Kelly, 1955, p. 64).

2. For Kelly (1955, p. 489), “Threat is the awareness of imminent comprehensive change in one's core structures” (italics in original).

3. In Kelly's (1955) sense, that aggressiveness is “the active elaboration of one's perceptual field” (p. 508) and dilation is broadening of the perceptual field.

4. Construing in which “a construct … preempts its elements for membership in its own realm exclusively” (Kelly, 1955, p. 153).

5. “Anxiety is the recognition that the events with which one is confronted lie outside the range of convenience of one's construct system” (Kelly, 1955, p. 495, italics in original).

6. One who assumes, like Kelly (1955, p. 15, italics in original), that “all of our present interpretations of the universe are subject to revision or replacement.”

7. One who, in contrast to the constructive alternativist, gathers facts.