DB's Pixnet

the psychologist march 2012
Page 250, Looking Back
George Kelly and the Garden of Eden
Trever Butt finds an interesting recurring theme in the later work of the famous personality theorist

...Following the publication of The Psychology of Personal Constructs, Kelly became a key figure in the development of clinical psychology in the USA. He was invited to speak all over the country and embarked on a world tour in 1961. Many of his essays, articles and talks were drawn together after his death and published by one of his ex-students, Professor Brendan Maher(1969). In these collected papers, Kelly moved to correct the growing misapprehension that construing was synonymous with thinking, and therefore the cause of behavior. There is an emphasis on construing as action and not in some strange way behind it. Personal constructs are not yet another way of constituting the ghost in the machine.

Although Kelly always insisted that a construct was not a concept, his 1955 definition focused on things: 'A way in which some things are construed as being alike and yet different from others'(1955, p.105). This allows(and perhaps even encourages) the reader to think in terms of concepts...

David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042,
April 18, 2012, Wednesday,
National Central Library,
Taipei City