Table Of ContentINQUIRING MAN:
The Psychology of Personal Constructs
INQUIRING MAN:
The Psychology of
Personal Constructs
THIRD EDITION
Don Bannister
and
Fay Fransella
First edition published 1971
by Croom Helm Ltd
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
Second edition published 1980
by Penguin Books Ltd
Third edition published 1986
by Croom Helm Ltd
© 1986 Don Bannister and Fay Fransella
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBN 0-203-40532-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-71356-7 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-03460-4 (Print Edition)
CONTENTS
Preface vii
1. The Psychology of Personal Constructs 1
2. The Person in Psychology 29
3. Exploring the Person 41
4. The Developing Person 63
5. Person to Person 86
6. The Person in Need of Help 111
7. The Person as Self-Creator and Self-Destroyer 134
8. A Personal Psychology 155
Appendix 170
References 175
Author Index 189
Subject Index 193
v
PREFACE
Successive prefaces to new editions of a book give the authors
increasing confidence in the book’s relevance (since people are
continuing to read it) but they also challenge them to make clear
their developing purposes in preparing these new editions.
Our preface to the first edition of Inquiring Man introduced the
book as an attempt to make clear what was singular about Kelly’s
theory of personal constructs. That purpose remains and we still
strive ‘to emphasise that construct theory sees man not as an infantile
savage, nor as a just-cleverer-than-the-average-rat, nor as the victim
of his biography, but as an inveterate inquirer, self invented and
shaped, sometimes wonderfully and sometimes disastrously, by the
direction of his enquiries’.
Our preface to the second edition stressed the way in which
personal construct theory was being taken up by a wide range of
professional groups and applied to a diversity of fields ‘as varied as
architecture, anthropology, religion, literature, commune life, map
construction, body image, language, children’s notions of self,
delinquency and deviancy, teaching techniques, methods of group
psychotherapy, liking and disliking, depression, social skills, racial
identity and so on and so forth’. This is now more than ever true and
we could add to our original sampling of fields, areas such as
economics, history, computerised learning, mental handicap, aphasia,
vocational guidance and many others.
This third edition can serve an additional purpose because it comes
on the scene a full thirty years after Kelly’s publication of his theory
in The Psychology of Personal Constructs. In that thirty years, while
the theory has acquired proven status as a practical tool and as a
rich source of new thinking, traditional psychology itself has
undergone vital, if cautious, change. The Behaviourist view of persons
as docile organisms, totally shaped by their environment, has yielded
ground over the last thirty years, to the tide of ‘cognitive psychology’.
Psychologists have, with great effort, reached an obvious conclusion
in their labours—if psychologists can think then it may be that their
subject matter (people) can think. Psychologists are edging towards
vii
viii Preface
a more humanistic vision of persons as active and creative, as agents
in their own right, not simply as responders to stimuli.
However, while the development of cognitive psychology has
begun to resolve the paradoxes that bedevilled early mechanical man
models, it is raising fearsome problems of its own; some so baffling
to the new wave in psychology that they have been simply ignored.
These problems are precisely those upon which personal construct
theory might cast light. Thus any cognitive psychology (by definition)
accepts the ancient division of the person into ‘cognition’ and
‘emotion’ (thought and feeling, reason and passion and all such
traditional dichotomies). Since cognitive psychologists are puzzled
as to how these two might relate, they informally agree to carve up
the person and arrive at non-competing (because separate)
psychologies of cognition and emotion. We are left with the unrelated
homunculi of thought and feeling.
Personal construct theory provides an integrated view of the person
by seeing ‘emotion’ as neither more nor less than construing in
transition. Thus the person is seen as a unity within a unified
psychology. Equally, cognitive psychology is trapped by the rigid
nature of its instruments (formal psychological tests) and by its lack
of developed theory, into working in terms of the conventional
segments of ‘cognition’, functions such as ‘memory’ and ‘perception’
or areas such as ‘number’ or ‘language’. Kelly, by providing more
imaginative ways of exploring our construing (repertory grid method
and self characterisation) and by developing a view of our constructs
as hierarchical and patterned into subsystems, liberated psychology
from what he called ‘the dread disease of hardening of the categories’.
In the next decade, personal construct theory may well continue
to be seen as radical, unorthodox and challenging, yet it may also
begin to be seen as relevant to the problems and themes of current
psychology, to be seen as speaking to the same issues, rather than be
regarded as an outsider.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS
1
When a scientist propounds a theory he has two choices: he can
claim that what he says has been dictated to him by the real nature
of things, or he can take sole responsibility for what he says and
claim only that he has offered one man’s hopeful construction of
the realities of nature. In the first instance he makes a claim to
objectivity on behalf of his theory, the scientist’s equivalent of the
claim to infallibility. In the second instance he offers only a hope
that he may have hit upon some partial truth that may serve as a
clue to inventing something better and he invites others to follow
this clue to see what they can make of it. In this latter instance he
does not hold up his theoretical proposal to be judged so much in
terms of whether it is the truth at last or not—for he assumes
from the outset that ultimate truth is not so readily at hand—but
to be judged in terms of whether his proposition seems to lead
toward and give way to fresh propositions; propositions which,
in turn, may be more true than anything else has been thus far.
(Kelly, 1969, pp. 66–7)
Currently many psychologists feel that psychology should concern
itself more with ‘whole’ people. It should centre more on ‘real human
experience’. This is comical in one sense—it is as if sailors suddenly
decided they ought to take an interest in ships—but necessary in
another. A variety of vanities have caused psychologists to turn
their backs on the complete and purposeful person. A craving to be
seen, above all, as scientists has led them to favour the clockwork
doll, the chemical interaction or the environmentally imprisoned
rat as their models of humanity. Further decades of massive
production by psychologists has left us still open to Notcutt’s
accusation:
Scientism is to science as the Pharisee is to the man of God. In
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