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George Kelly. Biografia

George Alexander Kelly was born in 1905 in Kansas. He pursued undergraduate study for three years at Friends University followed by one year at Park College. Here he graduated with the Bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics, but his interests had already begun to shift to social problems--perhaps in part because of experiences that he had gained in intercollegiate debates. In line with this newly developing interest, he pursued graduate study in educational sociology at the University of Kansas. His master's thesis was a study of the leisure time activities of workers in Kansas City, and he completed minor studies in labor relations and sociology.
At this point, George Kelly's activities expanded to include a wide range of teaching in different situations. He was a part-time instructor in a labor college in Minneapolis; he taught classes in speech for the American Bankers Association, and he taught an Americanization class for future citizens. An additional brief spell as an aeronautical engineer in Wichita followed teaching experience in Iowa and at the University of Minnesota. In 1929, he moved to the University of Edinburgh as an exchange scholar. Here he worked under the direction of Sir Godfrey Thomson, completing the Bachelor of Education degree in 1930 with a thesis dealing with the prediction of teaching success. He then returned to the United States and became a graduate student in psychology at the State University of Iowa. In 1931, he received the Doctor of Philosophy degree with a dissertation dealing with common factors in speech and reading disabilities.
He remained for a summer to teach at Iowa and then moved to the Fort Hays Kansas State College, where he remained until World War II. During the decade at Fort Hays, George Kelly's major interest was focused on the practical problem of providing clinical psychological services for the schools of the state. He was able to develop) a program of traveling clinics, serving the entire state and providing training experiences for his students there. In the period 1935-1940, he published a series of papers, six in all, mainly concerned with practical questions of clinical diagnosis, the operation of clinical psychology in school settings, the use of diagnostic testing, etc. Although, his later and major work was to be in the area of personality theory, George Kelly never abandoned his interest in the applied problems of clinical psychologists and in their training.
With the coming of World War II, Kelly entered the Navy as an aviation psychologist and was placed in charge of the program of training for local civilian pilots. Later he went to the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery of the Navy in Washington and remained in the Aviation Psychology Branch until 1945. In that year he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Maryland and in the following year a Professor and Director of Clinical Psychology at the Ohio State University. In the twenty years that George Kelly was to spend at Ohio State, he developed his major contributions to psychology. For the first few years of this period. his energies were mainly devoted to the organizing and administration of the graduate program in clinical psychology. In a few short years he succeeded in leading this program into the front rank of graduate training programs in the United States. He managed to achieve an atmosphere in which clinical interest and perceptiveness were combined with firm commitment to the methods and standards of science in a blend that was, unfortunately, rarely found in other similar programs.
In the meantime, he was working on the book that was to make his major contribution to the psychology of personality, and was to make him known to psychologists in all parts of the world. In 1955, the two-volume work, The Psychology of Personal Constructs, was published and gained immediate recognition as a unique and major development in the study of personality. Hard on the heels of its appearance came invitations to teach and lecture at universities in many corners of the globe. He held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, University of Nebraska, University of Southern California, Northwestern University, Brigham Young University, Stanford University, University of New Hampshire g he lectured at many other institutions in the United States, as well as a wide range of universities in Europe, the Soviet Union, South America and the Caribbean, and in Asia.
During this same period there developed an increasing volume of research into the implications and the applications of his theoretical viewpoint. He was elected President of the Clinical Division and also of the Consulting Division of the American Psychological Association. In addition to his teaching, writing, and administrative responsibilities, George Kelly was widely known and sought after as a consultant and counsellor on many matters pertaining to professional clinical psychology. He had served as President of the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology and his experience was valued as a wise guide in many problems of training and of ethics.
In 1965 he moved to Brandeis University where he was appointed to the Riklis Chair of Behavioral Science. It was as occupant of this chair that he died in March 1967, leaving incomplete his work on a new book in which he had planned to assemble and edit the many papers that he had delivered in the previous decade. More than most psychologists, perhaps, George Kelly's papers are themselves an autobiography of the man. In them, the reader will find the warmth, humor and tolerance that characterized him so well to those who knew him best.
Acknowledgment: the biographical notes are taken from the collection of Kelly's papers edited by Brendan Maher:-
Maher, B., Ed. (1969). Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York, Wiley.

C. George Boeree

George Kelly was teaching physiological psychology at Fort Hays Kansas State College in 1931. It was the time of the dust bowl and the depression. Recognizing the pains and sorrows of the farming families of this part of west-central Kansas, he decided to do something a little more humanitarian with his life: He decided to develop a rural clinical service.
Mind you, this was hardly a money-making operation. Many of his clients had no money. Some couldn't come to him, and so he and his students would travel, sometimes for hours, to them.
At first, Kelly used the standard Freudian training that every psychology Ph.D. received in those days. He had these folks lie down on a couch, free associate, and tell him their dreams. When he saw resistances or symbols of sexual and aggressive needs, he would patiently convey his impressions to them. It was surprising, he thought, how readily these relatively unsophisticated people took to these explanations of their problems. Surely, given their culture, the standard Freudian interpretations should seem terribly bizarre? Apparently, they placed their faith in him, the professional.
Kelly himself, however, wasn't so sure about these standard Freudian explanations. He found them a bit far-fetched at times, not quite appropriate to the lives of Kansan farm families. So, as time went by, he noticed that his interpretations of dreams and such were becoming increasingly unorthodox. In fact, he began "making up" explanations! His clients listened as carefully as before, believed in him as much as ever, and improved at the same slow but steady pace.
It began to occur to him that what truly mattered to these people was that they had an explanation of their difficulties, that they had a way of understanding them. What mattered was that the "chaos" of their lives developed some order. And he discovered that, while just about any order and understanding that came from an authority was accepted gladly, order and understanding that came out of their own lives, their own culture, was even better.
Out of these insights, Kelly developed his theory and philosophy. The theory we'll get to in a while. The philosophy he called constructive alternativism. Constructive alternativism is the idea that, while there is only one true reality, reality is always experienced from one or another perspective, or alternative construction. I have a construction, you have one, a person on the other side of the planet has one, someone living long ago had one, a primitive person has one, a modern scientist has one, every child has one, even someone who is seriously mentally ill has one.
Some constructions are better than others. Mine, I hope, is better than that of someone who is seriously mentally ill. My physician's construction of my ills is better, I trust, than the construction of the local faith healer. Yet no-one's construction is ever complete -- the world is just too complicated, too big, for anyone to have the perfect perspective. And no-one's perspective is ever to be completely ignored. Each perspective is, in fact, a perspective on the ultimate reality, and has some value to that person in that time and place.
In fact, Kelly says, there are an infinite number of alternative constructions one may take towards the world, and if ours is not doing a very good job, we can take another!

George Kelly was born on April 28, 1905, on a farm near Perth, Kansas. He was the only child of Theodore and Elfleda Kelly. His father was originally a presbyterian minister who had taken up farming on his doctor's advice. His mother was a former school teacher.
George's schooling was erratic at best. His family moved, by covered wagon, to Colorado when George was young, but they were forced to return to Kansas when water became scarce. From then on, George attended mostly one room schools. Fortunately, both his parents took part in his education. When he was thirteen, he was finally sent off to boarding school in Wichita.
After high school, Kelly was a good example of someone who was both interested in everything and basically directionless. He received a bachelor's degree in 1926 in physics and math from Park College, followed with a master's in sociology from the University of Kansas. Moving to Minnesota, he taught public speaking to labor organizers and bankers and citizenship classes to immigrants.
He moved to Sheldon, Iowa, where he taught and coached drama at a junior college, and met his wife-to-be, Gladys Thompson. After a few short-term jobs, he received a fellowship to go to the University of Edinburgh, where he received a bachelor of education degree in psychology. In 1931, he received his Ph.D. in psychology from the State University of Iowa.
Then, during the depression, he worked at Fort Hays Kansas State College, where he developed his theory and clinical techniques. During World War II, Kelly served as an aviation psychologist with the Navy, followed by a stint at the University of Maryland.
In 1946, he left for Ohio State University, the year after Carl Rogers left, and became the director of its clinical program. It was here that his theory matured, where he wrote his two-volume work, The Psychology of Personal Constructs, and where he influenced a number of graduate students.
In 1965, he began a research position at Brandeis University, where Maslow was working. Sadly, he died soon afterward, on March 6, 1967.

George Kelly - Psicologo, Matematico, Educatore. Ha creato la teoria della Psicologia dei Costrutti Personali. Nacque nel Kansas nel 1905. Nel 1909 fece un viaggio con la famiglia nel carro coperto del padre per recintare una terreno in concessione ai pionieri del west nel Colorado. Dopo essere ritornato alla fattoria nel Kansas frequentò irregolarmente la scuola e fu istruito dai genitori. Nel 1926 si laureò in fisica e matematica, in seguito in Pedagogia all’ Edimburgh University e in Psicologia nell’Iowa. Nel 1931 cominciò a lavorare in psicologia clinica, organizzando un programma di cliniche viaggianti dentro e fuori le aree rurali di Fort Hays nel Kansas. La ‘clinica viaggiante’ offriva i suoi servizi ad adulti e bambini attraverso psicoterapie e consulenze, ed era composta esclusivamente da lui e da suoi quattro studenti che lo aiutavano.

Lavorò soprattutto nell’area della psicologia clinica negli USA, elaborando la sua teoria della Psicologia dei Costrutti Personali, centrata sul cambiamento delle persone attraverso la psicoterapia, sebbene ritenesse il termine ‘psicoterapia’ inadeguato per descrivere l’avventura dell’uomo nella transizione e trasformazione. Infatti rifiutò sempre la terminologia tradizionale della psichiatria e della psicologia, ritenendola riduttiva e inefficace. Nel 1945-1946 fu nominato Professore e direttore dell’Istituto di Psicologia Clinica alla Ohio State University. Vi rimase sino al 1965 quando ottenne la Cattedra in Psicologia Teoretica alla Brandeis University. Morì nel 1967.