"A good deal
is said these days about being oneself. It is supposed to be
healthy to be oneself. While it is a little hard for me to
understand how one could be anything else, I suppose what is
meant is that one should not strive to become anything other than
what he is. This strikes me as a very dull way of living; in fact, I would be inclined to argue that all of us would be better
off if we set out to be something other than what we are. Well,
I’m not so sure we would all be better off - perhaps it would be more accurate to say life
would be a lot more interesting.
There
is another meaning that might be attached to this admonition to
be oneself; that one should not try to disguise himself. I
suspect this comes nearer to what psychologists
mean when they urge people to be themselves. It is presumed that
the person who faces the world barefaced is more spontaneous,
that he expresses himself more fully, and that he has a better
chance of developing all his resources if he assumes no disguises.
But
this doctrine of psychological nakedness in human affairs, so
much talked about today and which allows the self neither make-up
nor costume, leaves very little to the imagination. Not does it
invite one to be venturesome. I suspect, for example, that in the
Garden of Eden it might have occurred to Adam to take a chance
much sooner than he did if Eve had been paying a little more
attention to her wardrobe. As it was I hear she had to bribe him
with an apple. Later on they say she contrived a saucy little
something out of fig leaves.
What
I am saying is that it is not so much what man is that counts as
it is what he ventures to make of himself. To make the leap he
must do more than disclose himself; he must risk a certain amount
of confusion. Then, as soon as he does catch a glimpse of a
different kind of life, he needs to find some way of overcoming
the paralyzing moment of threat, for this is the instant when he
wonders who he really is - whether he is what he just was or is
what he is about to be. Adam must have experienced such a moment."
George Kelly - pp157-8
/ The Language of Hypothesis - 1964
* * *
BIOGRAPHY
George Kelly
- Psychologist, Mathematician, Educator - Invented the
theory of the Psychology of Personal Constructs - was born in
1905 in Kansas. In 1909 he made a family trip in his
father’s covered wagon to stake a claim on the last free
land in Eastern Colorado offered to settlers in the west. After
returning to the farm in Kansas he attended school irregularly
and was educated by his parents. By 1926 he had completed his BA
in physics and mathematics There followed a B.Ed. at Edinburgh
University and a Ph.D. in psychology at Iowa. In 1931 he began to
work in clinical psychology organizing a programme of travelling
clinics in and around the rural areas of Fort Hays, Kansas. This
travelling clinic offered services to children and adults in the
areas of psychotherapy, counselling etc. This ‘travelling
clinic’ comprised just himself and four of his students
helping out.
He worked mainly in the area of clinical psychology in
the USA, elaborating his theory of the Psychology of Personal
Constructs with a focus on personal change through
‘psychotherapy’ - although he did not like this term to
describe the human venture of personal transitions and
transformations and opposed the usual psychiatric and
psychological terminology as reductive and unhelpful. In 1945-6
he was appointed Professor and Director of Clinical Psychology at
Ohio State University. He remained here until 1965 when he took
up the Distinguished Professorial Chair in Theoretical Psychology
at Brandeis University. He died in 1967.
IDIOSYNCRASIES
Claimed as an
intellectual source / fellow-traveler by more mutually exclusive
schools of thought than any other writer.
SEE QUOTE FROM KELLY:
‘I have been
so puzzled over the early labelling of personal construct theory
as ‘cognitive’ that several years ago I set out to
write another short book to make it clear that I wanted no part
of cognitive theory. The manuscript was about a third completed
when I gave a lecture at Harvard University with the title,
‘Personal Construct Theory as a Line of Inference.’
Following the lecture, Professor Gordon Allport explained to the
students that my theory was not a ‘cognitive’ theory
but an ‘emotional’ theory. Later the same afternoon,
Dr. Henry Murray called me aside and said, ‘You know,
don’t you, that you are really an existentialist.
Since that time I
stepped into almost all the open manholes that psychological
theorists can possibly fall into. For example, in Warsaw, where I
thought my lecture on personal construct theory would be an open
challenge to dialectical materialism, the Poles, who had been
conducting some seminars on personal construct theory before my arrival, explained to me that ‘personal construct theory was
just exactly what dialectical materialism stood for.’ Along
the way also I have found myself classified in a volume on
personality theories as one of the ‘learning theorists,’ a classification that seems to me so patently
ridiculous that I have gotten no end of amusement out of it.
A few years ago an
orthodox psychoanalyst insisted, after hearing me talk about psychotherapy,
that, regardless of what I might say about Freud,
and regardless even of my failure to fall in the apostolic
succession to which a personal psychoanalysis entitled one, I was
really ‘a psychoanalyst.’ This charge was repeated by a
couple of psychoanalytically sophisticated psychiatrists in
London last fall and nothing I could say would shake their conviction.
I have, of course,
been called a Zen Buddhist, and last fall one of our former students, now a distinguished
psychologist, who was invited back
to give a lecture, spent an hour and a half in a seminar
corrupting my students with the idea that I was a
‘behaviorist'.
I think I should
tell you all this at the outset, so that a little later on when
you find that you are hopelessly confused by what I have to say,
you will not be overly critical of yourselves or me.’
- Kelly - The Psychotherapeutic Relationship -
1965
ARTICLES
Confusion
And The Clock by George Kelly [02.01.01]
On Becoming a
Personal Anarchist by
Spencer A. McWilliams [12.15.98]
An Introduction
to the Personal Construct Psychology of George A. Kelly by Vincent Kenny [09.02.98]
The Psychological
Reconstruction of Life: An Introduction to Personal Construct
Psychotherapy by Vincent Kenny [09.02.98]
Kelly,
Bannister and a Story Telling Psychology by Miller Mair [30.09.98]
The Threat of
Aggression by
George Kelly [06.12.98]
Hostility
by George Kelly [06.12.98]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bibliography
Personal Construct Psychology and
Psychotherapy:
A Bibliography
edited by Gabriele Chiari
