ABSTRACT

Many people, when confronted by personal construct theory, see it as a denial of the idea that ‘reality is what it is and no amount of thinking will change it’. Much has been made of the reflexive quality of personal construct psychology. Consider the implications of the idea of tightening and loosening as a cyclic process, essential to personal development. Just as many psychologists have opted permanently for a tight or a loose psychology, so many of us seem personally to have taken up residence at some fixed point in what should be a cycle. Orthodox psychologists seem to share one crucial assumption which is utterly unacceptable from a construct theory point of view. The vast majority of formal psychological experiments could win prizes for being exquisitely obsessional or the apotheosis of the platitude, but they could hardly be called acts of imagination. The aim of personal construct psychology, put at its most pious, is liberation through understanding.