ABSTRACT
It will be apparent from our discussion of personal construct psychotherapy that a very wide variety of techniques, some developed within alternative theoretical frameworks, may be employed in this treatment approach. Indeed, Kelly (1969f) viewed it as ‘a way of getting on with the human enterprise’ which ‘may embody and mobilize all of the techniques for doing this that man has yet devised’ (p. 221). Consequently, as Fransella (1972, p. 231) remarks, it may be that ‘if one observed a dozen people who say they are doing “personal construct psychotherapy”, they will seem to have very little in common’. She and Bannister have pointed out that, for example,
a personal construct psychotherapy might well include behaviour therapy methods if, for instance, the client was having difficulty in tightening construing in a given area. It might include a psychoanalytic type of free association if the patient had difficulty in loosening constructs. But the personal construct psychotherapist would retain throughout the view that clients are essentially experimental scientists in their own right, rather than people to be manipulated by the behaviour therapist or absolved by the analyst.
(Bannister and Fransella, 1986, p. 118)