His father is a former Presbyterian minister and his mother is a school teacher. His early education was completed in a compound teaching class under the guidance of his father at home. /kloc-at the age of 0/3, he was sent to Wichita, Kansas, where he entered four middle schools. After graduating from high school, he entered Quaker University in Wichita. Three years later, he transferred to Park College in Missouri, where he received a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from 65438 to 0926. At this time, his interest also turned to social issues, which may be partly due to his experience in participating in inter-school debates. So after graduation, he gave up the ideal that his family wanted him to specialize in engineering and went to the University of Kansas to major in educational sociology. His master's thesis is about the activities of Kansas City workers in their spare time, and he has also completed some research on labor relations and sociology.
1928 got his master's degree, and the following year he worked as a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He cooperated with Godfrey Thomson to study education and became interested in psychology. Under the guidance of the latter, I completed my bachelor's degree in education from 1930. This paper aims to discuss the prediction of teaching success. After returning to the United States in the same year, he entered Iowa State University and became a graduate student in psychology. 193 1 received a doctorate in philosophy. This paper discusses the general factors of speech and reading disorders. Later, he was hired by Hessburg State College in Kansas, where he worked as a teacher until World War II. At that time, it was during the economic panic in the United States, and many people fell into emotional distress because of the hardships of life. Kelly is very willing to help these people solve their psychological problems, but he feels powerless because he has not received clinical psychological training. In this case, Kelly started from the actual observation and tried to find a solution from the psychological characteristics of people with emotional distress. In this way, its shortcomings become advantages: without clinical psychological training, there is no limitation of traditional psychotherapy factions, which is conducive to the innovation of its personality theory, rather than being limited by traditional therapy theories and methods. Therefore, starting from school, he developed and established a state-wide touring psychotherapy group in the following years to provide consulting services for teachers and help them deal with students' behavior problems. During the period of 1935- 1940, he published a series of reports, six of which were mainly about the practical problems of clinical diagnosis and the use of diagnostic tests. Although his main work later was in personality theory, he never gave up the application and training of clinical psychology.
After the outbreak of World War II, Kelly joined the navy as an aviation psychologist and was the training director of regional citizen pilots. Later, he went to Washington state and became a health bureau and a naval clinic. 1945 After the war, he first served as an associate professor at the University of Maryland, and 1946 transferred to Ohio State University as a professor and director of clinical psychology. In the following 20 years, he led the establishment of a famous clinical psychologist training program. Thanks to his successful leadership, his research institute has ranked first in the United States for several years in a row. 1965 was invited by brandeis University in Massachusetts to give a lecture on psychology, so he left Ohio.
Kelly was elected as the chairman of the clinical branch and consulting branch of American Psychological Member, and he is also a professional consultant of many clinical psychology.
Kelly's psychological thought and its contribution to psychology mainly lie in his personality theory, which is constructed by integrating the thoughts of self-knowledge, free choice and self-responsibility emphasized by humanistic psychologists. This personality theory has the following two points:
1. Personality depends on personal cognition.
? Before Kelly, the construction of personality theory was either psychoanalytic (emphasizing subconscious motivation) or behaviorist (emphasizing environmental influence). Kelly's personality theory especially emphasizes the formation of individual behavior and even the whole personality, which is determined by his cognition and evaluation of the surrounding environment (including people, things, things, etc.) According to years of clinical psychology experience, he found that any change in patients' views on themselves and their problems would make their condition better. He also found that all the teachers who came to the psychological clinic to talk about students' psychological problems were related to their own views. Therefore, Kelly believes that no matter whether a person is mentally normal or abnormal, his behavior is determined by their understanding, expectation, evaluation and thinking of people, things and things in the environment. This is not determined by his motives or needs.
Two. Personal construction theory
Kelly called the concept of personal construction formed by individuals' understanding, expectation, evaluation and thinking about people, things and things in their environment. Everyone's life experience is different, and personal construction naturally varies from person to person, so personal construction represents his personality characteristics. Take parents' corporal punishment of children as an example. For parents, corporal punishment can correct deviant behavior and is conducive to children's growth. For children, parents' corporal punishment has to be reluctantly accepted; For social workers, corporal punishment by parents is child abuse; For missionaries, parents' corporal punishment of children is an extension of God's judgment on the evil world. This phenomenon shows that different people have different personal structures. Personal structure, like micro-scientific theory, is the main tool for a person to predict events. Kelly vividly described his personal construction. He said: "Humans observe the world through various translucent patterns or templates created by themselves, and then try to adapt to the reality that constitutes this world ... Let's name these patterns as different structures for people to try." A structure is useful if its predictions are confirmed by experience. If this prediction is not confirmed, this structure must be modified or abandoned.
? Individuals need to go through a lot of trials and twists and turns to get a very realistic and constructive system. A person's personality is a pluralistic unity composed of personal ideas. There are several important concepts in personal construction theory, a basic hypothesis and 1 1 inference, which are described as follows:
? First, the important concepts of personal construction theory
1. Everyone is a "scientist": everyone has the motivation to understand all the stimuli that affect us, just as scientists try to predict and control the occurrence of events. We also want to know the world around us so that we can predict and control what happens to us.
2. Scientists as human beings: As above, scientists are actually like ordinary people. There is no absolute right or wrong in personality theory, and each theory has its weaknesses that are questionable. There is no absolute truth, only relative facts.
3. Constructive Substitution: Everyone uses different personal structures and organizes their structures in different ways. Construction is the core of Kelly's personality theory. Construction is an idea, viewpoint or hypothesis that people use to explain their personal experience. A building is like a miniature scientific theory. People use this theory to predict reality, and any contact between individuals and the outside world is constantly creating and verifying personal construction.
2. The basic assumption of personal construction theory: all human activities are guided by the structure he uses to predict events. Kelly doesn't think that past conflicts and external stimuli are the basic factors that shape behavior. He believes that our relationship with past experience is limited to the time when these experiences can help us develop personal construction and expectations for the future.
3. 1 1 Inference of personal construction theory
1. Construction inference: individuals predict events by repeatedly constructing things.
2. Personality inference: People have individual differences in the process of constructing events. This is self-evident, and everyone has a deep understanding.
3. Organizational inference: In order to predict events, everyone will develop a special construction system, which includes various construction sequence relationships. You can use order or hierarchy flexibly.
4. Selection inference: individuals make choices in binary construction based on the greater expansion possibility of prediction and the definition of their own system. That is, if … yes, if not … no.
5. Dichotomy inference: Personal construction system consists of limited dichotomy.
6. Fragmentation inference: individuals can continue to use various construction systems, but these systems are incompatible with each other.
7. Range inference: A construction is only suitable for predicting events within a specific range.
8. Empirical inference: the individual's construction system will change with the individual's repeated experience.
9. Modulation inference: the change of personal building system is limited by the permeability of the building within the scope of application. For example, if Liu Xiang's strength is 100 meter hurdles, then for him, the permeability of the 400-meter race walk is not very strong, while the permeability of 100 meter hurdles is very strong; If a believer and his followers believe in God, then God has a strong permeability to him, and he is the last to adjust and change. On the contrary, the construction with weak permeability is easier to adjust.
10. * * Common inference: Two people's experience structures are similar, which means that their psychological processes are similar to others.
1 1. Social inference: People living in the same culture will construct experiences in a similar way. Man's understanding of the construction process of others determines his role-playing in social processes including others.
Like some psychologists, Kelly also applied his theory to psychotherapy. According to his personal construction theory, Kelly developed a psychotherapy method called role setting therapy. The so-called fixed role therapy is that the psychologist sets a role for the emotionally troubled person that he is easily aware of at present, and then assists him to play it. The purpose of this practice is to hope that people who are emotionally troubled will change their unhealthy views in role-playing. In the process of psychotherapy, the psychologist only gives assistance and support from the side, instead of correcting the behavior of the emotionally troubled person, and only wants him to treat himself in the cognitive change. This idea is quite consistent with that of the humanistic psychologist Rogers.
Different from other psychologists, he believes that people have psychological barriers because of problems in their construction system, not because of past traumatic experiences; Those experiences can only be used to explain why people construct the world in this way, but they are not the cause of their psychological obstacles.
In his view, mental patients are bad scientists who keep making the same predictions without experience. Because their construction system can't correctly predict future events, anxiety is inevitable; In other words, when they can't predict future events, they will feel anxious. Why do people's structures sometimes fail to accurately predict future events? An important reason is that some constructions are incomprehensible, so people can't learn new knowledge from new experiences. Without this continuous improvement of learning and construction, people's ability to expect the future will inevitably decrease, and it is increasingly difficult for people to control and control their own lives.
Kelly believes that the purpose of psychotherapy is nothing more than helping patients to establish new structures, establish hierarchies at a high speed, and improve the original structures, so that they can better predict events, in other words, train patients to become better scientists.
The therapist's first step is to use the role construction test to find out what the world construction looks like in the patient's eyes. Patients can be encouraged to conduct self-tests to obtain information about their own systems. There are many ways to help patients form useful structures. If the patient's structure looks loose, let them make it more compact. At the same time, some useful examples can be given to patients as standards to follow.
The second step of the healer is fixed role therapy. In the process of treatment, the patient is given a personality model and asked to perform, that is, the patient is asked to play another personality that is significantly different from what he knows. Kelly encourages patients to try on a new personality just like trying on new clothes, and urges patients to act in a new way, see themselves in a new way and become a new person. This therapy is generally similar to psychodrama therapy's, and its core is to make patients play a brand-new role in life, think and act according to the new role until they naturally accept the new role and internalize it, so that their psychological obstacles will be solved.
Kelly particularly emphasized that psychological disorders are best treated with rational methods, that is, telling patients how to deal with their difficulties and rebuilding their lives with new methods. In his words: "The purpose of psychotherapy is to get people back to the direction that life should have."
For example, a woman has formed the idea that "my husband is a lazy man". If she discovers the fact that her husband is a lazy man, she will be satisfied with the usefulness and sexiness of this idea; If she finds her husband's diligent behavior, she will feel uneasy because her thoughts are useless.
People are always forming and verifying structures. Once the construction system is established, people will be restricted by it.
Kelly found that when teachers tell questions about students, they are actually explaining their own problems, not the students' problems. Based on this, we can judge that when a woman tells her husband's problems, she is actually exposing her own problems more than her husband's. A woman's view of things is the problem, because this view does not come from the thing itself, but from her structure.
Construction is a personal choice. Some people live in a narrow experience, and their construction is closed and restrictive. Others live in a vast world, and their construction is open and creative. On the other hand, some people choose a positive structure, and they look at things around them with a positive eye. Some people choose negative thoughts. They look at things around them with negative eyes.
Eliminating invalid construction Invalid construction is a construction that cannot correctly predict the facts of life, and its real root comes from anxiety, fear and threat.