ABSTRACT
Our position rests to a large extent on the assumption that an individual attaches meaning to his experiences in a self-consistent manner, and that his actions in a particular situation are determined by the personal meaning of that situation to him. In this respect we share common ground with Kelly (1955), whose Psychology of Personal Constructs is based on the notion that each individual sees the world through the ‘goggles’ provided by a unique, hierarchically organized system of personal constructs. Kelly regarded the building blocks of an individual's personal construct system (i.e. constructs) as ‘transparent patterns or templets which he creates and then attempts to fit over the realities of which the world is composed’. They are essentially bipolar, the two poles of a construct defining a way in which some elements in the person's world are similar to each other and thereby different from others. Each construct can only appropriately distinguish between certain elements, the area of a construct's potential applicability being termed its range of convenience, while those events to which it is maximally applicable constitute its focus of convenience. When the individual finds that events cannot be fully understood because they are largely outside the range of convenience of his construct system, he experiences anxiety.
