ABSTRACT
Aggression refers to the degree to which a person involves himself in spontaneous elaboration. It means that he takes steps which lead somewhere. Aggression may eventuate in guilt because it may lead to misadventures in elaborating one’s role constructs. The novel role relations one aggressively seeks to establish may collapse. Aggression in the area of role relations may thus lead quite directly to guilt. Psychotherapy in cases where aggression appears to invite guilt is, as one might expect from the psychology of personal constructs, first directed at maintaining a minimally adequate role for the client. If a clinician wants to establish a dependency relationship between his client and himself, he will ordinarily let his client weep in one of the early interviews. The therapist may encourage loosening of construction in order to make the client less sensitive to invalidating evidence.
