Fay Fransella

Personal construct psychotherapy and counselling do not fit easily into any one pre-existing category.  The psychology of personal constructs that underpins them is cognitive in the sense that it deals with how people make sense of the world around them.  It is humanistic in the sense that it deals with the total person and not just how we think or how we behave.  But it is also behavioural in the sense that it gives a prominent and unusual place to our behaviour.  In addition it is more than any of these.  As George Kelly says:

Personal construct theory . . . is a theory about how the human process flows, how it strives in new directions as well as in old, and how it may dare for the first time to reach into the depths of newly perceived dimensions of human life.

It is essentially an approach to helping those with psychological problems that focuses on how we experience the world as individual human beings.  It does not see us as being the victims of our past history - although we can trap ourselves if we come to see past events in that way.  We impose our own individual meanings on everything and the work of the counsellor or psychotherapist is to try to look at the world through the client's eyes.  Only in this way can they get some idea of why the client is having the problems for which they are seeking help.

Further information about this therapeutic approach written by the authors, can be found in "Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy: The Essential Guide", edited by Professor Stephen Palmer and published by Sage, London.  Price £18.99.

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