thanks for coming and talking with me about george kelly's personal construct psychology nice to be able to talk to anybody about that yeah well let me let me ask you um kelly's personal construct psychology when you think about personality theories um you know a lot of them start with a central premise right uh uh striving for superiority a need for completion uh the drive towards self-actualization does kelly have a premise that he starts with or what animates and distinguishes this particular theory well i think the core motivation for kelly is really the quest for meaning in life and it's assumed to be a deeply personal quest but intricately woven into the network of our social relations and so kelly is quite concerned with the way in which we really are scanning our experience in order to discern basic patterns and themes in our lives especially our social lives which are plenty complex enough to to call for a lot of attention as we try to figure out what's going on in this relationship is this a person i can trust or is this someone i really need to avoid or you know is this going to be a relationship that moves toward intimacy or more distance and these kind of core constructs that kind of orient us to other people and to ourselves i think are at the heart of construct theory that everybody's putting together a system of meaning and they're doing it by drawing on the ideas of their place and time and culture their family they're drawing on their own life experience and and they're looking for experiences that either validate the kind of are in line with the way they're framing events the lens through which they're looking at the world or that challenge that basic frame and kind of forces to as kelly would say reconstrue to make an alternative sense of what's going on and so in my particular uh application of it i'm really interested in the role of traumatic life events loss events that really shake up our assumptive world our our core constructs as kelly would say and often force us to to reorganize and to formulate different meanings for who we are and whose we are and where we're going in the wake of a life experience that calls into a question a lot of what we thought we knew as we now embark on something that's all together different so i almost get the sense of of unique or distinctive patterns that we develop that are organic and change and shift across time that that they're responsive to the environment they're responsive to the world but that they are almost instruments of inquiry that we use them as mechanisms to negotiate our way through life in some way shape or form really saw people as active agents that we are attempting to build patterns that we place onto our experience in order to make sense of it kelly was famous for saying we don't events don't wear their meanings on their backs for us to just read and follow the orders of the natural world instead we construct our system of meaning and this is why they're personal constructs we we personally are responsible for the meanings that we either borrow and make use of or innovate upon or configure whole cloth out of our own experience and so he did speak about the language of hypothesis that we are always drawing on the past in order to project into the future in order to help us orient in the present to negotiate a world that makes sense and to negotiate that most particularly with others in intimate relationships and so there's really an instrumental function to our perceptions they're designed to help us better organize our sense of the world to make the world more meaningful to be able to navigate our way through more effectively absolutely and although kelly is often credited as the the father in a way of cognitive theories of personality in many respects we have to remember that he rejected the idea of cognition he believed that cognition versus emotion was a badly phrased construct and it was something that hampered psychological inquiry throughout the whole of western a false dichotomy and somehow a false dichotomy that what we have are essential orientations that we take to life our quest for sense making is infused with passion and and emotion and so for kelly feelings have functions so anxiety is the experience of being caught with your constructs down you're immersed in a world of experience something's happening you don't quite get it you can't wrap your your your mind and heart around it that's something that eludes your capacity to really anticipate predict and engage meaningfully uh undermines any possibility if you're controlling the circumstance so it's in ways like this that notions of emotion are reinterpreted as a signal of our construct system being challenged and changed by our ongoing experience so is it fair to say that as you would undergo as you would undergo significant change it would necessarily invite feelings would there be well invite compel or confront us with feelings that we strongly resist because we always have the option of saying no to the call of the world and when we do we move into what kelly called hostility the notion that we force fit our constructs on experience right we maybe we have an idea of people in our group are like this and people in another group are like that and regardless of the evidence for people's humanity we force fit them into those rigid offense stereotype categories for example and so people will engage in a kind of definition by contrast that we we sort of lift ourselves up by putting the other down so to say that people are scientists as kelly said is not to say they're good scientists often we're twisting the evidence to fit our constructs and kelly would also say that although people are scientists that the best scientists like the best artist are bold in their theorizing they go beyond the data they in a way are not just simply looking to you know keep track of what's happening and write it down like a chronicle but we we write fictions and we make up theories we we boldly go where no person has gone before kind of in star trek language and and in that way he sees human progress across the course of a lifetime people are very much engaged in a process of development that is is so lifelong the developmental psychology is not a special thing right it is the whole of psychology we are developing organisms and moreover across generations across historical time we see the evolution of cultural construct systems in which we find our way or which we innovate upon on our own distinctive contributions now that concept of innovation invites for me the kind of tension or dialectic between the retention or preservation of ourselves and the relinquishing of that in order to undergo this bold quest that you're talking about how do we negotiate preserving what is familiar and feels good the retention of who i am versus the relinquishing of who i am so that i can become something different or more well that's the 64 000 question and it's it's one that every person asked for herself himself or themselves because the the reality is that some of us may be highly inclined to innovation we are risk-taking we we love kind of doing what kelly called um a kind of an elaborative movement where we're we're stretching the envelope we're we're you know leaning into new experiences we're challenging ourselves we're growing we're learning others of us prefer to kind of hunker down and become more and more specialized in a given area in which we feel pretty secure so he talked about two kinds of of psychological growth one of which is more involved dilation of our system where we're going to open up the lens and taking in new experiences and then a different kind where we we sort of focus down it's like life under a microscope where we're looking at things more and more carefully but within a defined field so people will engage in two different kinds of growth if you will some going deep some going broad but we don't have infinite flexibility in this regard if we are to maintain that sense of coherence with our core constructs that you're kind of alluding to that how do we remain knowable to ourselves how do we recognize who we are from one life chapter to another and and so in a way uh kelly would talk about how our core constructs need to be pretty comprehensive they have to be pretty broad right maybe we have an idea we're really oriented towards freedom we're really oriented toward love but that construct we are we sort of live in a way that's coherent with those central goals or values and we don't so easily overthrow those central roles and values in order to simply you know move into an area that is is radically different so we're often negotiating the challenge of change yeah i can see that so i can see the pull toward the preservation of some aspect of continuity that just provides coherence to our lives but opens up the possibility at the same time that's right that's right and so they to further complicate that of course it's not only that we are doing this for ourselves but that we're also typically doing it in close relationships and so we need in a way to negotiate a pattern of change that lets us be comprehensible not only to ourselves but also to the people we're most innovatively linked to our partners our families and and there's you know a big price to pay for deviating from those assumptions the constructs if you will that others place on us and so in a way you have almost the construct police right around you attempting to hold you into the frame of the person they knew you to be so construct theory is is deeply interesting in this regard because it is one of the personality theories that is the most intricately personal and individualistic and at the same time that the most intensely social and woven into the pattern of our relationships especially with those people we're most attached to yeah it could as easily be interpersonal construct theory is personal construct there some people have developed just that that frame like our colleague harry proctor in england i really began by looking a lot at family construct systems and aside from the constructs that individuals have what are the the options that families see for organizing their identity so you get some families in which a couple of kids get phds and another doesn't graduate from high school right and that they take different positions on the construct of you know even being educated or having different opinions or political views and so the the negotiation of identity in a social field in a way that has deep emotional significance and that really involves working and reworking our self-narrative in a way is at the heart of construct theory so so that's that's interesting and it invites you said something that really intrigued me and it had to do with this notion of other intimate players in your life as being important validating agents yes that they could simultaneously maybe invalidate or validate certain parts of you and i almost began to think as you were talking that validation itself could be a double-edged sword that the validation supports who you are but also maybe makes it a little bit difficult for you to become something that the individual may need for you to remain as absolutely so and that a part of you also is allied with and even though kelly himself did not talk in terms of dialogical self theory that a kind of additional kind of constructivist narrative development which hubert herrmann's especially has advanced in many ways it's compatible with that the idea that as kelly would say we can use many different subsystems of constructs that are inferentially incompatible that's the kind of language that we get kelly in trouble because people will say what the heck do you mean by inferentially incompatible but what he's saying is you know at the end of the day we don't necessarily add up we have a tendency to move toward greater integration but we also have a tendency to move toward greater differentiation and so there are always aspects of us that don't comfortably fit into the overall view maybe i'm i have elaborated a a system of identity that's built around being a scholar but then there's the artist that's kind of knocking on the back door saying when do i get my turn or a person may have a predominant orientation maybe toward heterosexual relationships so there's a part that is kind of bi-curious you know and so these sorts of tensions about who we are who we want to be there may be no single answer that arises within us well it's the plurality of the self in some ways exactly right exactly and a lot of people culturally will experience that right if they find themselves in multiple linguistic groups they actually have these differential construct systems for myself as a you know as a as a english-speaking person or myself at home with my you know spanish-speaking parents or my spanglish friends or absolutely it simultaneously enables and disables the expression of certain parts of themselves that's right that's right and of course that the capacity to immerse ourselves in these different cultural fields if we take that the goal of diversity and moving toward greater richness not merely as a statement about the you know our social world generally and valuing different cultures but being willing to step into them and to do the work and the play that's involved in learning other languages and living respectfully and with curiosity and excitement within different frames this can be an enormous engine of growth for us individually and relationally now you mentioned something earlier that i wanted to be sure to to return to because as you were talking about the person taking responsibility for him herself and these themes of autonomy and these themes of authenticity and responsibility in particular i almost got echoes of existentialism i almost got notions that you are what you make of yourself and this sort of well there there is that aspect of kelly that it is in fact he has the choice corollary and uh this is one of the ways in which he addresses this that in any given situation you know we have a lot of latitude as to what sense we make of it how are we going to approach this uh is this a situation that you know we're confronted by a global pandemic is it real or is it a hoax that's one basic construct right is it something we can surmount is it something we succumb to we have a whole set of constructs defined by contrasts and the the choice of the construct we apply is very consequential and if we especially are in positions of authority then of course how we construct the challenge or the crisis will have immense implications of a life-and-death kind for the people subject to our authority and of course even at our own decision do i wear a mask or do i not and and like other constructs it gets linked with others in the system so it becomes a red state versus blue state educated versus uneducated um you know capitalist versus socialist sort of linkage that you know we behave in a way that has real consequences for our own health and those of others linked to the broader implications of this construct within the system of meaning and value and core constructs and freedom versus responsibility and so and so when i choose then um in this framework of meaning marked by perceived contrasts when i choose this over this i choose to go this direction rather than this direction kelly's assumption is it's because i perceive greater possibility or elaborative potential or meaning or comprehension in this route over this one right and another person may be in the same fork on the road and choose the other alternative or a different path altogether and this is that constructive alternativism notion that's right and so when when you know it it's as if kelly would be responsible for the old joke when you come to a fork on the road take it that there's not there's no single route that is correct and incorrect in this way it is a remarkably judgment-free psychology and whereas if you look at existential uh writings and you've got jean-paul and so on and heidegger and these kind of philosophers of existentialism they have a pretty clearly preferred choice you know it's like as sart says right we're condemned to freedom and choosing in the direction of freedom is the way to go kelly is more like maurice merlo ponti and a phenomenological psychologist we are condemned to meaning right but it's the personal meanings that matter and so the fork you know on the road carries two options and depending on our own inclinations we're going to lean toward the right or the left now let's talk a little bit more detail about this meaning by contrast concept because this is really different than really any other personality theorist that i'm familiar with meaning derives from contrast tell us about that how is it that meaning gets forged from perceived differences well we know what something is by knowing what it's not and we are looking to construct and to identify critical choice points in our relationships right um i go out to a bar do i approach this person or do i not i you know somebody starts conversation with me do i accept a drink from him or her do i not um and things progress and at each point we're making decisions that are of a consequential kind that could lead to a an intense relationship of uh a brief encounter or a lifetime and so at all these points we're looking for the news we can use in our lives and we do it by looking for the alternatives that experiences open to us yeah so so as i'm in that bar and i'm choosing to talk to this person versus this person or i'm choosing whether or not to talk to this person i get a sense of that as being a construct in action but it's not really a cognition right it's it's it's a it's a corridor through which i i move it's an embodiment in some ways rather than absolutely and so one can think of that and with a tip of the hat to sigmund freud uh recognizing the the deep importance of our non-conscious sense making that very much of the pattern recognition in which we engage whether it's you know driving down the highway and uh you know some dog runs in front of us and we swerve the car we we're making a behavioral choice to turn right or left to get around that and but that's a deeply implicit choice um much of our sense making is affective it is behavioral right it is as you say kind of embodied it is not this the robotic kind of cognitive construct that is applied to the world it's not that way at all it's infused with feeling it's very consequential for our behavior and so understanding that probably the majority of our constructs are implicit they require sometimes deep reflection sometimes if we're working in therapy we might make use of expressive arts modalities in order to configure internal experiences that lack labels that what kelly called pre-verbal constructs all of these are they they invite a a broad psychology of being that embraces a lot of modes of creative exploration and creative work in the context of therapy against them and so kelly's approach to counseling or psychotherapy then is is it uh is it a collectivist kind of approach or what does he draw when i think of cognitive theory i think of you know the triple column technique i think of you know rationally motive i think about working with incognition is that true of personal construct therapy what does that look like yes and no now you're asking the right person about this because i'm probably the only person alive who listened to 75 hours of george kelly doing psychotherapy recorded in the 1950s with a a client who is a a pretty tense and obtuse obsessive kind of guy and i listened to a remarkable number of interventions that kelly had and and many of them were very thoughtful probing uh in in many ways that foreshadowed and borrowed from a lot of different traditions of therapy and but at the end of the day i think there kelly had his formal aspect where he might do a a rep test with a client and so he might have people nominate a dozen figures from their lives your mother your father yourself uh someone who uh you loved and loved you back and ex flame as he said like a previous uh partner and i remember in working with this client this was a guy who was in his early 20s he'd never had any kind of a romantic relationship and i would just remember him saying you're safe there dr kelly there's no one no ex flame right and so uh kelly would have to innovate and you know maybe invite a description of the person he would like to be in love with or like to be in love with him so he would take a handful of these these figures present them three at a time consider your mother your father and yourself what's some important way in which two of those are alike and different from the third and uh you know the guy would say well you know dad and i like to be very orderly you know my mother is more unpredictable so orderly versus unpredictable would be one such construct and he would give sorts of different people and come up with a set of constructs and then he the client would be invited to place himself on those other people on those constructs and you can begin to get a sense of how the constructs go together how what implications they carry one for the other but at other times kelly would be very much more kind of creative and theatric so and along the lines of your you're asking he would do group therapy and the group therapy would consist of having a bunch of people and it's not just they're sitting in a circle and they're talking about their sorrows and the therapist is trying to talk them out of them you know this kind of conception of your therapy or something it's not like that what he would do is um if they'd be working on issues of grief for example he'd say okay um and i i wonder uh greg would you be willing to uh here's the role that we would like to invite you to play and give you a little description of it and then bob here's the role we'd like to ask you to play and now you know and then you come back into the room and you've been minimally coached on the roll and what my role says is you have just had a fight with your 14 year old child and he stormed out of the house and said i'm i'm running away and i'm never coming back and he just ran away and then the other person what he is asked to do is you know he he's coming from the police department and he he needs to inform this family that their child was just hit and killed in the road um and so he knocks on the door and so take it from there this is part role play and part psycho drama oh absolutely it is it casts people in a role where they're dealing not necessarily with the literal events of their lives but with the deep themes of their lives and so issues of guilt and empathy and you know how does one approach a suffering person would be engaged with one person and for the other wearing the protective mask of make-believe they have to nonetheless take on board the reality of profound and traumatizing loss and somehow you know respond to that and at other times kelly would engage in what is called fixed role therapy now he's almost putting you into a a profound and potentially traumatic context and inviting you to sort of construe your way out yeah right i mean this is like there's no there's no given plotline you need to figure out how to which is like gushing there's no given plot line you need to kind of figure it out and so and and that too would characterize fixed role therapy which is somewhat better known but again very different than a characteristic cognitive behavioral therapy where you may write a character sketch of yourself at the invitation of the psychologist but the goal is to write it from the standpoint of someone who knows greg intimately and sympathetically maybe better than anyone actually could know him and to do it in the third person and start out by saying you know greg is and then there's no more scaffolding you are facing that blank page just as you face the blank page of life and you describe yourself again intimately so it's inviting a step of self-compassion but also candor and you kind of describe yourself and then the psychologist often working with a team of people will come up with a a creative kind of identity uh for you and so maybe you become not greg but phil phil anthropic right or maybe a woman is given the role of uh freda free to choose and that and given a kind of character sketch to perform in the context of his or her life secretly not letting anybody in on it they just meet with the psychologist every now and then you know and report on how things are going and how it's going and uh and so that alternative sketch is that designed to be something different just different but but not the contrast of who they are so a highly introverted person is not coached to be highly extroverted but they might be coached to be very interested in people and so they're having deep conversations with the detective or sleuthing things out right curious yeah so what he would be looking for is not to reverse people's constructs but to do what he called constructing an orthogonal construct orthogonal construct that would just cut a little differently and then to you know have conversations with friends from that standpoint and to kind of read the things that a person with that orientation would have maybe they'd start reading mystery novels more because they're kind of interested in how things work how minds work or maybe they would uh yeah find it uh interesting to go to different kinds of ethnic restaurants because it's a new experience they kind of want to meet people in different cultural settings they might change the way they dress right so perhaps they're used to dressing in kind of a stodgy way and instead you know they're asked to kind of get hip and kind of you know do something a little different beans on and whatever right absolutely and so you begin to pull for a different relationship from the world and immerse yourself uh in that and then you come back and the beauty of it is you d-roll i see you set that on the table and then you talk about what was that like to take on that identity for a while bob great and uh so the notion is in some ways to sort of rattle their cage or to break them out of a of a overly fixed impermeable construct system and experience the world in a different way because as they enact themselves in a different way presumably they're calling for different kinds of validations from the world but not to do it in a way that threatens their core constructs like you respect the core commitments that people have but you look at a different way so maybe the person is oriented toward maybe let's take that hypothetical introvert being very reflective but they've mainly done that by hunkering down and they reflect on books instead you take that reflectiveness you respect it but then you turn it in a social direction and you give them enough of a scaffolding that maybe it's someone who loves playing uh role play games you know in a kind of dungeons and dragons way or maybe a video game universe a multi-player game where you kind of have to figure out what the other players are doing and where they're coming from and so that could be an example of you know making the world safe for change with the goal of the therapy not being to produce a certain kind of outcome but to allow the person to recognize hey life can be pretty different and if i'm dissatisfied with how it's going if a part of it feels too stagnant for me i can step into a different way of being it's literally an embodied version of kelly's notion of constructive alternativism isn't it you're you're constructing an alternative identity the goal is not to have you wear that mask so long that you become that thing but that you recognize that there are an infinite number of possible ways of being yeah life becomes a role-playing game but a serious one because at the end of the day we will have given our life to something and as kelly once said it could be something noble or ignoble right but if we haven't succeeded in finding something worth living for then our death itself becomes meaningless as well so back to the existential themes that's right and so i i think kelly was certainly a closet existentialist but he was a a personologist first and foremost really looking at how do individuals work out this thing called living and how does that evolve across time and if you see a legacy or legacy of kelly's work moving forward i mean this was the psychology of personal constructs back in the mid 50s if you see contemporary expressions or vestiges where where are they in the world of psychology at this point what would you see as legacies left behind by personal construct psychology or contributions that it has made to the landscape of personnel well i think some of the certainly expressions within the field of cognitive theory both personality theory and in psychotherapy you do have explicit acknowledgement on the part of founding figures like i've had conversations with aaron beck and he credits kelly as kind of prompting him toward a cognitive turn people who make use of schema notions those were of course invented by the constructivist frederick bartlett who studied memory back in the 20s 30s so bartlett within cognitive psychology piaget within developmental psychology and kelly within clinical psychology were really all founding figures of constructivist movement and you see strong influences of each in the clinical and developmental and cognitive areas nowadays in many ways i'm a walking relic right the place where i've carried forward the vestiges of kelly is into the the field of looking at how people respond to loss and trauma and the way in which losses of people places projects possessions professions protections we thought we had with those we are challenged and changed our core constructs if you look at life in the in the the covet era for example as people have basic constructs about the world being predictable or unpredictable right or controllable or uncontrollable or having a sense of agency versus not so much these are all constructs that we might have been heavily invested in but the world says no to them and suddenly as a global community as a humanity we have to grapple with some pretty core changes in our core constructs and so that quest that happens on a universal level or at the individual level when you know my mother dies or my child dies or my partner dies or i am abandoned by someone i love or betrayed these are things that really challenge our core constructs and we reorganize our lives and identities around them there's no one right way to construe there's no one right way to grieve but we we can look at grieving partly as a process of reaffirming or reconstructing a world of meaning a construct system that has been challenged by laws and so i've been very interested to pursue many dozens of research projects with a wide network of national and international colleagues and collaborators a hundred studies at this point and many others have too to look at the powerful role that the ability to make meaning of these difficult life events that the meaning that has the implications that carries for people's subsequent uh adjustment the level of complexity or complication in their grief or their trauma symptomatology for example and again and again and again we find that meaning is the bridge between the challenge and the outcome that when we can somehow scaffold a bridge that links those two worlds we can move toward an intelligible future we can retain enough coherence with the past to project meaningfully going forward then then we do okay we're pretty adaptable except when we're not and when our core constructs are eroded or exploded by uh traumatizing events we often find that we can't find that forward road there's no fork in the road because the the bridge linking us to the ongoing road has collapsed and so people can be very stuck in that place so that's the process that we attempt to study and particularly to work with clients in because i'm a practicing clinician for the entirety of my career as well as being an academic and researcher and i'm very interested in a deeply heartfelt struggles that people have around this well and the way you're describing it suggests to me that because our systems of construing are under perpetual change and we're confronted with demands for change at every turn it's it is part of life that it's almost fair to say that we can't get through life without grief because you can't get through life without loss right yes and it's a matter of how we negotiate that and whether we wind up running a ground or whether we can find forms of meaning that help us bridge past those impasses that's that's well said that you know if if we were in a college course on the psychology of loss and grief it would be a kind of part of the core curriculum it wouldn't be an elective right in the in the school of life it's part of the core curriculum and how we learn the lessons of loss in our lives through the inevitable losses not only death related but the the death of our ideals the death of our uh trust in another uh the the death of our naive sense of our own vulnerability right all of these constructs get shaken up repeatedly across the course of living and how we confront those challenges shapes who we become and so i do think that the lessons of loss are profound and they are best understood within something like a personal construct frame that recognizes that it's not just that our feelings are hurt by an experience of loss right we suffer real soul pain when those core constructs that we count on to make sense of ourselves and to make sense of our lives and our relationships are powerfully challenged by the death of someone who we relied on to leave those things out it helps me understand how people who are as their agent and they lose their cohort group find that they just have this profound loss of meaning because all of the agents of validation with whom they've shared life and participated with in things are gone and they just wind up feeling adrift in a context that's utterly unfamiliar bereft of the core moorings that kind of held them intact and reaffirmed who they were and it's people at every level so maybe we have a spouse with whom we've had a lifelong relationship and the spouse dies of cancer or dies a neuron at a time to alzheimer another dementing condition or dies a breath at a time to copd and and in all of these contexts then we the death of the other may portend a death of a part of the self that was linked to that other as to use your term a validating agent it's like who now shares this history with me does my whole past go into oblivion i've lost both of my parents maybe i've lost my siblings who is the witness to my my story um and that's a profound question that that can happen of course with whole groups so one might have uh you know think about an aging white cohort in america and they grew up in the 1950s maybe 40s and life seemed simpler then and there were clear roles that that males and females occupied and if there were immigrants they had a certain role in the culture and uh maybe there's a whole racial kind of schema and dynamic that carries over from that period and it's it's a challenging thing to step into a decade that where all that has changed and all of those roles and privileges there unto appertaining as a college degree will tell you suddenly have to get called into question you got to do some major updating of your identity constructs at a cultural level as well as at an individual level and you can imagine how people stumble over that at times and in what kelly called hostility hunker down in an older construct system and try to force fit people into the categories that we maintain so at another level beyond the individual we can understand construct theory as having a deep cultural relevance for the the kinds of issues that may divide us and define us uh at a at a national level and beyond it's really a distinctive contribution for personality psychologists isn't it they have this construing occur at multiple different levels it can be all the way down from an individual through familial systemic social cultural historical these construct systems can operate at multiple levels simultaneously and simultaneously enable and disable us as we try to navigate our own way through these through these corridors bob thanks very much for taking the time and talking with me about george kelly's personal construct psychology it's a pleasure thanks