ABSTRACT
Compared to the attention paid to structural disorders of construing, relatively little concern has been shown by personal construct theorists with disorders of construct content. Kelly (1955) himself devoted only a page to this topic in his description of different types of psychological disorder, although stating that ‘Quite frequently the client's difficulty arises out of the intrinsic meaning of his personal constructs rather than out of the general form which they have assumed’ (p. 935). While at first sight this apparent neglect of disorders arising from the content of the client's constructs may seem surprising, it perhaps reflects the constructive alternativist view that there are many viable alternative constructions of reality: given such a position, how could a personal construct psychotherapist regard a client's particular way of construing the world as disordered? Here lies the essential difference between the personal construct theory and cognitive approaches, a point to which we shall return later.
