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George Kelly Quotes

1905–1967 United States

George Alexander Kelly (April 28, 1905 – March 6, 1967) was a psychologist, considered the father of cognitive clinical psychology and best known for his theory of personality, Personal Construct Psychology.

United States
Psychologists

Also known as: George A. Kelly, George Alexander Kelly

Random George Kelly quote

10 quotes

Man anticipates events by construing their replications.

Diagnosis is all too frequently an attempt to cram a whole live struggling client into a nosological category.

The classic threefold division of psychology into cognition, affection, and conation has been completely abandoned.

From the standpoint of the psychology of personal constructs we may define a disorder as any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation.

Fundamental Postulate and its Corollaries

Johann Herbart’s work on education and particularly mathematical psychology influenced me. I think mathematics is the pure instance of construct functioning—the model of human behaviour.

We attempt to use the phenomenologist's approach to arrive at personalized constructs which have a wide range of meaning for the given individual; then we attempt to piece together this high-level type of data with what we know about other persons.

Man develops his way of anticipating events by construing, by scratching out his channels of thought. Thus he builds his own maze. His runways are the constructs he forms, each a two-way street, each essentially a pair of alternatives between which he can choose.

I have been so puzzled over the early labelling of personal construct theory as ‘cognitive’ that several years ago I set out to write another short book to make it clear that I wanted no part of cognitive theory.

While we could agree with the psychological phenomenologists and assign an important place to generalization within the realm of the individual, we were quite sure that some data must be lifted from the realm of the individual and construed nomothetically that is, in a realm comprising many individuals.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: George Kelly (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.