0.18 Cognitive perspectives on personality development  (Page 11/30)

As the client is engaging in these processes, the clinician is also conceptualizing their own role. Overall, the goal of any therapist should be to assist in the continuous reconstruction of the client’s construct system, and the changes that take place in therapy should set the stage for continued reconstruction after therapy has been discontinued. Initially, the therapist may rely on a variety of techniques to accomplish superficial reconstructions. The therapist needs to be patient, and initially must accept the client’s construct systems as they are. The latter point is quite similar to the empathy described by Carl Rogers in humanistic, client-centered therapy, and Kelly does indeed use the word “empathize” in his own writings. As therapy progresses, the therapist needs to help the client select new conceptual elements, accelerate the tempo of the client’s experience, and design and implement experiments. Finally, the therapist serves to validate the client’s experiments as they attempt to reconstruct their construct systems (Kelly, 1955b).

Psychological Assessment within Personal Construct Theory

Kelly believed that therapy was a joint effort between the therapist and the client, and since the goal was the ongoing reconstruction of the client’s psychological systems (even after therapy), the client ultimately needs to become his own therapist. Therefore, the psychotherapeutic interview (Note: by “interview,” Kelly means what we would commonly call a therapy session) becomes an essential part of therapy. Throughout the process of the interview, the therapist makes decisions regarding the course of the interchange between the therapist and the client. Overall, the decisions made by the therapist are tailored to the specific client, but still the therapist must remain in control of the interview. This requires that the therapist plan for the interview. Those plans include how often to interview the client, how long the interviews should last, the tempo of the interview, and when to terminate the interview. Since the client continues to live their life outside of the interview room, the therapist must also consider whether special circumstances will require special interview plans (Kelly, 1955b, 1958). One of the most practical aspects of the interview is that the client can simply provide information needed by the therapist, to a point:

…there is a useful adage for clinical psychologists to follow on occasion: if you do not know what is wrong with a person, ask him; he may tell you. (pp. 322; Kelly, 1955a)

The Role Construct Repertory Test (Rep Test) was developed by Kelly in order to understand how a client’s personal constructs influence their personal-social behavior. The client begins with a Role Title List , on which they list the names of important people in their lives (see Table 10-1). The names are then grouped three at a time, and the client is asked to describe in what important way two of the three individuals are alike but different than the third person. A more organized form of the Rep Test, particularly useful for research purposes, involves creating the Repertory Grid . Once again the client is asked to identify significant people in their life. The grid provides three-person pairings that address various relational factors (family, intimate friends, conflicted relationships, authority figures, and values), and as before the client provides a construct that associates two of the people yet distinguishes them from the third. The common factor is listed as the emergent pole , the distinguishing factor is listed as the implicit pole . The Rep Test does not result in specific outcomes, so its interpretation is also subject to different methods. If the Rep Test is interpreted formally, it will provide results on the number and range of constructs present within the client’s construct systems. In the hands of an experienced and skilled examiner, information can be gleaned on the equivalence of constructs, thus providing deeper detail on the effective range of the client’s construct system. As more information is obtained from the Rep Test, the better able the therapist will be to guide the therapeutic process (Kelly, 1955a).