Kelly, George Alexander - Introduction

Introduction

1905–1967

AMERICAN CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, Ph.D., 1931

George Alexander Kelly (1905–1967) spent the early years of his career focused on the issue of providing clinical psychologists for schools. He founded and developed the traveling psychological clinic while teaching at the Fort Hays campus of Kansas State College. During the years of the Depression up to the time the United States joined World War II, Kelly and his team—many of them graduate students who learned their trade through this experience—traveled all over Kansas treating teachers, parents, and children. His work at the time included the practical issues of clinical diagnosis, clinical psychology for school settings, and the use of diagnostic testing, in addition to other aspects of dealing with the developmental concerns of students, teachers, and parents. His discoveries during these years formed the basis of his psychology of personal constructs.

Kelly noted an important similarity among the people he treated in the public schools of Kansas. He determined that the problems teachers identified in students were often reflective of themselves more than the personality of the students. The next step that followed for him was a simple one. He concluded that there was no objectivity, or absolute truth, in determining the reality of a situation—specifically, that the meaning of all that happens in a person's life emerges from the way in which that person interprets it. This idea of individual interpretation represented a view known as "constructive alternativism." He argued that the individual acted as a scientist. Kelly contended that a person interpreted a situation or environment a particular way, and thus acted deliberately with those interpretations in mind. Also, verbal or nonverbal modifications of an action were usually a result of whatever outcome the person had come to expect through experience. Thus, the person used his or her interpretation as scientific hypothesis, with the resulting actions similar to scientific research and experiments.

By the 1950s when Kelly published his two-volume work, behaviorists and professionals using the psychodynamic approaches in psychology dominated the field. Kelly's approach was regarded as radical. Behaviorists believed that an individual was virtually a passive entity. How a person turned out was due to the environmental forces or influences on the person, rather than the actions a person decided to take. The psychodynamic theory also involved interpreting the individual as passive—but as one who reacted to internal unconscious motivations rather than outer influences. According to Fay Fransella and Robert A. Neimeyer writing about Kelly in the International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology in 2003, "For Kelly, we are forms of motion and we propel ourselves—no one or no thing does it 'to' us."

Kelly practiced and published in the midst of others who were also committed to unlocking the mysteries of human behavior and development. Kelly provided a respectful but determined opposition to the psychology his contemporaries espoused. His research had a philosophical approach, and he was influenced by philosophers such as John Dewey, a pragmatist and religious thinker; as well as Alfred Korzybski, a linguistic philosopher. Others who helped form Kelly's psychology included Hans Vaihinger, whose philosophy was one of as if in his own version of constructive alternativism; and Jakob Moreno, whose use of psychodrama and its role-playing approach held a place of prominence in personal construct therapy.

Personal construct psychology as first presented by Kelly, and as it has developed over the 50 years since his work was published, has been seen as a complete psychology, not simply a theory. At its basis is the repertory grid, which provides a basic table for an individual to answer questions and analyze what they reveal about that person's cognitive processes. In essence, this method of psychological testing is one that requires the use of the rational mind. Kelly's psychology provides tools to a rational human being for planning future actions, based on knowledge of past and present actions.