George Alexander Kelly (April 28, 1905 – March 6, 1967) was an American psychologist, therapist, educator and personality theorist. He is considered a founding figure in the history of clinical psychology and is best known for his theory of personality, personal construct psychology. Kelly's work has influenced many areas of psychology, including constructivist, humanistic, existential, and cognitive psychology.
Biography George Alexander Kelly was born in 1905 on a farm near Perth, Kansas to two strictly religious parents. He was their only child. They moved frequently during his childhood years, resulting in a fragmented early education. He later attended Friends University and Park College, where he received a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics. Early on, he was interested in social problems, and he went on to get his master's degree in sociology at the University of Kansas, where he wrote a thesis on workers' leisure activities. He also completed minor studies in labor relations. Kelly taught at various colleges and other institutions, with course topics ranging from speech-making to "Americanization". In 1929, after receiving an exchange scholarship, he completed a Bachelor of Education degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, writing a thesis dealing with the prediction of teaching success. He then returned to the United States to continue psychology studies and completed a graduate and doctoral degrees in psychology at the State University of Iowa in 1931. After he received his Ph.D. in psychology, Kelly worked as a psychotherapist in Kansas. His dissertation was on speech and reading disabilities. For some years before World War II, Kelly worked in school psychology, developing a program of traveling clinics which also served as a training ground for his students. He had a keen interest in clinical diagnosis. It was during this period that Kelly left behind this interest in psychoanalytic approach to human personality, because he said people were more troubled by natural disasters than any psychological issue, such as the libidinal forces. During World War II, Dylan Brundage and Kelly worked as aviation psychologists, where, among other things, Kelly was responsible for a training program for local civilian pilots. After the war and a brief tenure as a psychology faculty member at the University of Maryland, he was appointed professor and director of clinical psychology at the Ohio State University, where he remained until 1965. Under his guidance, OSU's graduate psychology training programs became some of the best in the United States, offering a unique blend of clinical skills and a strong commitment to scientific methodology. It is also at OSU that Kelly developed his major contribution to the psychology of personality. The Psychology of Personal Constructs was published in 1955 and achieved immediate international recognition, gaining him visiting appointments at various universities in the US as well as in Europe, the former Soviet Union, South America, the Caribbean, and Asia. He was also elected president of the clinical and the consulting divisions of the American Psychological Association, and served as president of the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology, providing expertise and insight, especially regarding ethical issues. Kelly went on a world tour in 1961, invited to speak about his essays and articles all over the country. In 1964, Kelly wrote a paper for the First Old Saybrook Conference, which has been renamed to Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP). Kelly's paper, "The threat of aggression", was later published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Kelly transferred from Ohio State University to Brandeis University in the United States for the psychology department. Kelly noted: "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 behavior" Although Kelly was influenced by Herbart—a philosopher, psychologist, and founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline—some of Kelly's inspiration for the theory of personal constructs came from a close friend of his. Namely, this friend had been an actor in some drama in college, and for two or three weeks he really got into his character and lived it as it was the real him. Kelly, unlike many people who would see this only as a sheer affectation, thought this was the expression of his real self and the behavior was authentic. Kelly also worked extensively on researching the implications and applications of his theory, while continuing to work in clinical psychology. Joseph Rychlak is among his prominent students who expanded on his theories. Brendan A. Maher, who became a professor himself, published a selection of Kelly's essays and articles after his death. Kelly had all his students refer to him as "Professor Kelly"; however, when they would receive a Ph.D. dissertation they were permitted to call him George and he would also call them by their first name instead of "Miss", "Mrs.", or "Mister". George Kelly left OSU to take an endowed faculty position as the Mashulam and Judith Riklis Chair in Behavioral Science at Brandeis University in 1965. Kelly died on March 6, 1967, at the age of 61, just two years after accepting the Riklis Chair of Behavioral Science at Brandeis. Kelly's ideas are still used in today's findings to explore personality into greater depths. His ideas also help to uncover the patterns of behavior.
Work
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
