ABSTRACT
Many a reader has fallen by the wayside between pages 1 and 1197 of George Kelly's The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955), the two-volume magnum opus which set out the new psychology that he had fashioned out of his attempts to systematise his clinical practice. This is perhaps due not so much to the length of this first statement of personal construct theory as to the unfamiliarity of the terms in which it is couched. Although at first sight it may appear that, in the fashion of some personality theorists, this was an attempt to produce a pseudo-scientific language of neologisms, it was due more to the fact that Kelly was putting forward an alternative to existing psychologies, the terms and concepts of which he could not borrow as they would come complete with their own networks of implications. Thus, the reader will find ‘no ego, no emotion, no motivation, no reinforcement, no drive, no unconscious, no need’ (Kelly, 1955, p. x, italics in original); and that psychological disorders are classified in terms of the way in which the client makes sense of his or her world rather than using conventional diagnostic categories. When familiar terms, such as hostility, guilt, anxiety, and role, are used, they afford little comfort to the reader as they are generally defined in novel ways. As will be seen later, such a situation of finding one's well-tried concepts wanting is likely to generate anxiety, similar to that experienced by the non-mathematically inclined psychologist who opens a statistics textbook. And one way of avoiding anxiety is to close the book.
