Psychopathology and Therapy by George Kelly

 

Kelly's definition of a psychological disorder: "Any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation." The behaviors and thoughts of neurosis, depression, paranoia, schizophrenia, etc., are all examples. So are patterns of violence, bigotry, criminality, greed, addiction, and so on. The person can no longer anticipate well, yet can't seem to learn new ways of relating to the world. He or she is loaded with anxiety and hostility, is unhappy and is making everyone else unhappy, too.

If a person's problem is poor construction, then the solution should be reconstruction, a term Kelly was tempted to use for his style of therapy. Psychotherapy involves getting the client to reconstruct, to see things in a different way, from a new perspective, one that allows the choices that lead to elaboration.

Kellian therapists essentially ask their clients to join them in a series of experiments concerning the clients' life styles. They may ask their clients to loosen their constructs, to slip them around, to test them, to tighten them up again, to "try them on for size." The intent is to encourage movement, essential for any progress.

Kelly, with his background in drama, liked to use role-playing (or enactment) to encourage movement. He might take the part of patient’s mother express his feelings. After a while, he might ask her to reverse roles with him, he becomes patient mother, and he became patient! In this way, patient become aware of his own construction of your relationship and your mother's construction. Perhaps patient will begin to understand her, or see ways in which he can  adapt. Patient may come to a compromise, or discover an entirely new perspective that rises above both.

Kelly's therapy often involves home-work, things he would ask patient to do outside the therapy situation. His best known technique is called fixed-role therapy. First, he asks patient for a description of himself, a couple of pages in the third person, which he calls the character sketch. Then he constructs, perhaps with the help of a colleague, another description, called the fixed-role sketch, of a pretend person.

He writes this sketch by examining patients original sketch carefully and using constructs that are "at right angles" to the constructs patient used. This means that the new constructs are independent of the original ones, but they are used in a similar way, that is, they refer to the same range of elements.

Kalian therapy has, as its goal, opening people up to alternatives, helping them to discover their freedom, allowing them to live up to their potentials. For this reason, and many others, Kelly fits most appropriately among the humanistic psychologists.

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