ABSTRACT
For Kelly (1955, p. 775), diagnosis was ‘all too frequently an attempt to cram a whole live struggling client into a nosological category’ by preemptive construction of the client's behaviour. By contrast, the diagnosis made by the clinician who adopts a personal construct theory approach will be propositional and transitive, being primarily concerned with the avenues of movement open to the client rather than with providing a static description of his or her current predicament. In viewing psychological disturbance ‘in terms of dimensions rather than in terms of entities’ (Kelly, 1955, p. 831), it does not succumb to the danger of reification, the transmutation of labels and metaphors which describe groups of behaviour into ‘things’, which has been discussed by Rowe (1978) in relation to psychiatric diagnosis. As Kelly (1955) noted, one of the drawbacks of this latter ‘disease entity’ approach is that clients’ difficulties may be ignored if they cannot be conveniently subsumed by one of the disease categories employed. In contrast to this approach, transitive diagnosis concerns itself with six questions, namely:
Exactly what is peculiar about this client, when does he show it, and where does it get him?
What does the client think about all this and what does he think he is trying to do?
What is the psychological view of the client's personal constructs?
In addition to the client himself, what is there to work with in this case?
Where does the client go next?
How is the client going to get well?
(Kelly, 1955, p. 779)
