Kelly, George Alexander
1905–1967
AMERICAN CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, Ph.D., 1931
Brief Overview
George Alexander Kelly (1905–1967) spent the early years of his career focused on the issue of providing clinical psychologists for schools. He founded and developed the traveling psychological clinic while teaching at the Fort Hays campus of Kansas State College. During the years of the Depression up to the time the United States joined World War II, Kelly and his team—many of them graduate students who learned their trade through this experience—traveled all over Kansas treating teachers, parents, and children. His work at the time included the practical issues of clinical diagnosis, clinical psychology for school settings, and the use of diagnostic testing, in addition to other aspects of dealing with the developmental concerns of students, teachers, and parents. His discoveries during these years formed the basis of his psychology of personal constructs.
Kelly noted an important similarity among the people he treated in the public schools of Kansas. He determined that the problems teachers identified in students were often reflective of themselves more than the personality of the students. The next step that followed for him was a simple one. He concluded that there was no objectivity, or absolute truth, in determining the reality of a situation—specifically, that the meaning of all that happens in a person's life emerges from the way in which that person interprets it.
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