Principles
The main tenet of PCP theory is the following:
A person's unique psychological processes are channeled by the way s/he anticipates events.
Kelly believed that anticipation and prediction are the main drivers of our mind. "Every man is, in his own particular way, a scientist," said Kelly, in that he is always building up and refining theories and models about how the world works so that he can anticipate events. We start on this at birth (a child discovers, "if I cry, mother will come") and continue refining our theories as we grow up. We build theories -often stereotypes- about other people and also try to control them or impose on others our own theories so that we are better able to predict their actions.
All these theories are built up from a system of constructs. A construct has two extreme points, such as "happy-sad" and we tend to place people at either extreme or at some point in between. Our mind, said Kelly, is filled up with these constructs, at a low level of awareness. Kelly did not use the concept unconscious, instead he believed that some constructs are preverbal, 'their lack of verbal labels often being because they were developed before the person had the use of words' (Winter, 1993, p.244). A given person or set of persons or any event or circumstance can be characterized fairly precisely by the set of constructs we apply to it and the position of the thing within the range of each construct. So Fred for instance may be just half between happy and sad (one construct) and definitively clever rather than stupid (another construct). The baby above may have a preverbal construct "Comes... doesn't come when I cry".
Constructs are applied to anything we put our attention to, including ourselves, and also strongly influence what we fix our attention on. We construe reality constructing constructs. Hence, determining a person's system of constructs would go a long way towards understanding him, especially the person's essential constructs that represent very strong and unchangeable beliefs; and also the constructs a person applies to him/herself.
Read more about this topic: Personal Construct Theory
Famous quotes containing the word principles:
“I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“[The sceptic] must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge any thing, that all human life must perish, were his principles to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease, and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Struggle is the father of all things.... It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.”
—Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)