George Alexander Kelly

At a glance

Lived 1905 to 1967. American. Clinical Psychologist.

Active 1931 to 1967. Landmark year 1955. Clinical era: 1946 to 1969, humanistic, behavioural and systems.

Lineage: Cognitive, behavioural and contextual. Roles: Modality founder or co-founder; Clinical theorist.

Associated modalities: Personal Construct Therapy (PCT); Constructivist Psychotherapy; Cognitive Therapy; Narrative & Coherence Therapies.

Founder of personal construct psychology, a theory of how people interpret and anticipate events.

Review status: Educational draft, subject review pending. Source status: source checks not documented for this draft. Dates, sources and clinical statements require independent verification and specialist review.

Clinical overview

George Alexander Kelly developed personal construct psychology, an approach to personality and psychotherapy. Born near Perth, Kansas, he studied physics and mathematics, then educational sociology and psychology, receiving his doctorate at the University of Iowa in 1931. During the 1930s he worked with rural communities in Kansas through travelling psychological clinics.

After serving as a Navy aviation psychologist during the Second World War, Kelly directed the clinical psychology programme at Ohio State University and later moved to Brandeis University. His two-volume The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955) presented a theory in which people anticipate events through their personal interpretations.

Historical and clinical context

Kelly noticed a strange double standard in mid-century academic psychology: psychologists viewed themselves as rational, hypothesis-testing scientists trying to predict and understand the world, while viewing their human subjects as blind organisms pushed by unconscious instincts or conditioned reflexes. Kelly inverted this hierarchy with his 'person-as-scientist' metaphor, arguing that every client is an active scientist who constructs an idiographic network of bipolar discriminations ('personal constructs', such as `gentle versus humiliated` or `dependable versus unpredictable`) to anticipate interpersonal reality.

Kelly called his philosophical position constructive alternativism: interpretations can be reconsidered or replaced. Within his theory, difficulties can arise when a person's ways of anticipating events no longer serve them. This is a theoretical account, not a universal explanation for psychological distress.

Core therapeutic contributions

Constructive Alternativism, the Fundamental Postulate, and Bipolar Constructs. His theory is organised around a fundamental postulate and eleven corollaries. It treats personal constructs as contrasts used to interpret events; a person's own contrast for a quality may differ from someone else's.

The Role Construct Repertory Test (Repertory Grid) and Self-Characterization. Kelly developed the Role Construct Repertory Test, from which repertory grid methods developed. One way of eliciting constructs asks how two people are alike and differ from a third. Later practitioners also developed techniques such as Dennis Hinkle's laddering.

Credulous Approach and Fixed-Role Therapy. Fixed-role therapy invites a client to experiment with a character sketch and alternative ways of acting. The technique is part of Kelly’s theoretical approach; its outcome for a particular person cannot be assumed.

In the consulting room

Therapeutic stance. Playful, respectful research supervisor who adopts the 'credulous approach' (taking the client's subjective worldview seriously as a valid hypothesis system) and co-designs safe behavioural experiments in the laboratory of the consulting room.

Signature practices. Inquiring into the submerged contrast pole of a client's self-description ('If you weren't being so cautious and quiet in that meeting, what is the opposite kind of person you would be?'); Using the Repertory Grid, Self-Characterisation sketches (written in the third person by an imaginary sympathetic friend), and 'laddering' ('Why is that pole important to you?') to map core constructs; Fixed-role therapy: experimenting with an alternative character sketch and ways of acting

Common misreadings. Treating Kelly’s constructive alternativism as identical to every later constructivist approach. It is his particular account of how interpretations can be reconsidered or replaced.; Using the Repertory Grid as a mechanical psychometric test divorced from Kelly's phenomenological 'credulous listening' and therapeutic playfulness

Landmark clinical works

1955, The Psychology of Personal Constructs (Vol. 1: A Theory of Personality; Vol. 2: Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy) (book). Two-volume masterwork presenting constructive alternativism, the Fundamental Postulate and eleven corollaries, the Repertory Grid, transitive diagnosis, and Fixed-Role Therapy.

1963, A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs (book). Widely read paperback edition of the first three chapters of the 1955 work, introducing the person-as-scientist model to students and clinicians worldwide.

1969, Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly (edited by Brendan Maher) (book). Posthumous collection of Kelly's essays on the language of hypothesis, hostility as extortion of evidence, psychotherapy as an experimental method, and human agency.

Clinical critiques and limitations

Kelly's specialised vocabulary and theoretical assumptions invite interpretation and debate. His concepts should be distinguished from independently established explanations of distress.

A 2007 quantitative review included 22 published studies comparing personal construct therapy with a control group. Its abstract reported smaller overall effects than previous reviews and differences according to the outcome measure; this historical review does not establish effects for every population or technique.

Clinical genealogy

Influences and mentors: John Dewey; Alfred Korzybski; Jacob Levy Moreno; Hans Vaihinger; Kurt Lewin.

Collaborators: Brendan Maher; Alvin Landfield; Donald Bannister.

Students and successors: Donald Bannister; Fay Fransella; Dennis Hinkle; Robert Neimeyer; Vittorio Guidano; Michael Mahoney; David Winter.

Related reading

• ApproachesCognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
• ApproachesFamily and systemic therapy
• TimelineGeorge A. Kelly publishes The Psychology of Personal Constructs
• PeopleJacob Levy Moreno