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Letter to Freud from George Kelly
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Essay of 3 pages for the course Personal Construct Psychology at University of Hertfordshire (N/A)
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To: Sigmund Freud20 Maresfield Garden
NW3 5SD
West Hampstead
London
Dear Sigmund,
I have given great thought and admiration to your psychoanalytic approach, paying particular
attention to childhood, reinforcement, and punishment. I’ve used this to lead me the way to
discovering the personal construct psychology.
What is a construct? A construct is a bipolar dimension, they are your ‘goggles’ of life. This
is what allows us to make decisions and predictions, it gives us control over others and
situations. We can't ‘know’ about something unless we know what contrasts with it. An
example construct might be clean vs messy - another individual might say this construct
could be bland vs creative, this is because constructs are personal to the individual and there
is no right or wrong answer. Constructs can change over time however it is quite difficult to
do so as in some cases changing one construct can lead to changing others.
Which leads me to my explanation on eliciting a construct. To begin with, elements must be
chosen, these are usually ‘role titles’ given on the basis of the problem area of the client for
e.g. role titles for ‘someone sad’, the client will then pick someone/describing word for each
of the elements. This can be done in many ways but I will be demonstrating via a triadic
approach. The respondent is faced with 3 elements (triads), from here the client will be asked
the following question, with the exclusion of psychical features “is there any way in which
two of these elements (emergent pole) are similar and dissimilar from the third (contrast
pole)?” If the client is unable to think of a dissimilarity, an alternative would be to find the
opposite of the ‘similar’ word.
Once the constructs have been created the next stage is a reparatory grid which is in other
terms a blank matrix to be filled with numbers. This is a quantitative and qualitative way of
analysing data. Using numbers on both edges of the grid to represent two opposites, with the
elements plotted between, the interviewer will split the poles on the left and right side of the
grid. The reparatory grid can be numbered in two ways – either rating scale (x being one pole
and y being the other) or ranking scale (x being one element and y being another – no
element can be the same number). This grid can then be analysed to find any patterns in the
numbers which can imply various aspects of the respondent views of thyself for e.g.
admirations, fears, goals.
The fundamental postulate refers to the manner in which we act, being congruent with our
expectations of the world on the basis of interpreting past events. In order to understand the
fundamental postulate further I have created a ‘table of contents' - 11 corollaries which can
explain why we see the world differently, how we interpret information and how we
influence the perception of others. I will keep it brief by giving you an overview of 3.
Individuality corollary answers the “why do two people in the same situation behave
differently?” Well this is because we see through our construct (bipolar dimension)
‘goggles’. Further, a construct based on the same thing will never be 100% identical. In
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