Clinically, Kelly developed a psychotherapy technique called fixed-role therapy. In fixed-role therapy, the therapist asks the client to adopt a different identity for a two-week period. The client is asked to act the part of someone whose constructions and behaviors are significantly different from the client’s. Because the client is only playing a role, any threat that might occur as a result of violating one’s own personal identity are minimized. After all, the client is simply playing a part. However, in so doing the client experiments with alternative ways of construing and behaving that may produce personal growth.
Personal construct psychology has become associated with theories of constructivism, which emphasize that people know the world indirectly through constructed understandings. Radical constructivism views the person as a closed system, one in which a person’s internal psychological structure determines experiential reality. One’s structure is only sensitive to specific kinds of stimulation from the external world. People do not experience the world as it is, but rather experience it only in the ways their internal structure allows. On the other hand, social constructionism deemphasizes individual knowledge construction and instead stresses that human understandings spring from ongoing relationships. Through discussion and interaction with each other, people negotiate and reach consensus about what is real and true. Discourses, defined as ways of talking about reality, shape human experience. As people use discourses in novel ways over time, shared constructions of reality evolve. Whether individually or socially focused, constructivist theories stress human involvement in knowledge construction, maintaining that people can only know the world indirectly via their constructions.
SEE ALSO Constructivism; Personality; Psychoanalytic Theory;