ABSTRACT
An important feature of such an approach is that clinical diagnosis should be construed as the planning stage for client reconstruction. Diagnosis is all too frequently an attempt to cram a whole live struggling client into a nosological category. An important feature of diagnosis is the determination of the client’s capacity to work with a therapist. Part of the task of diagnosis is to determine the order in which the diagnostic steps should proceed. As in all clinical work, one arrives at a diagnosis by successive approximations. Transitive diagnosis is not complete until a plan for management and treatment has been formulated. From the standpoint of the psychology of personal constructs, diagnosis is properly conceived as the planning stage of client management. Few modem clinicians will doubt but that a good diagnosis involves a search for the areas of a client’s anxiety.
