This bibliometric review covers the scientific production with or about the repertory grid technique between 1998 and 2007. The analysis of previous reviews suggests the need for a more careful and broad process of bibliographic research. With this aim, 24 bibliographic sources were used to cover a wide range of specialties. We began with the drawing up of an explicit protocol in which the research terms were detailed. Then the bibliographic sources were consulted, taking into account a specification of inclusion and exclusion criteria. As a result of this process, 973 references were obtained: 468 were journal papers, 335 book chapters, 108 doctoral theses and 62 books. The review also evaluates the types of documents found, the evolution of the number of works published, the repertory grid’s fields of application and the degree of openness to other disciplines. The most relevant authors, their affiliations, their countries and the publication language are also revealed in this article, as well as the major journals contributing to disseminate the work done with this technique. Relevance: Since Kelly created his personal construct theory (PCT), the repertory grid technique (RGT) has been the most well-known instrument used not only by researchers and practitioners within PCT but also across a variety of disciplines and approaches. In the present work, we try to portray a recent picture of the status of the RGT using bibliometric analysis.

From an ecological perspective, humans are built to detect important meanings in their life spaces. These meanings are not so much imposed on reality as already there in reality. However, humans still construct their realities in the sense that what patterns of meaning they respond to are differentially determined by what they attend to. Thus they configure their realities. Humans experience their realities primarily in terms of nonverbal, nonconceptual detection of meaning patterns. Perception needs to be distinguished from cognition, and it is argued that the “human as aesthetic experiencer” is a better model of how humans function than the “human as naive scientist”. Implications for psychotherapy, such as for the concepts of resistance and transference, are discussed.

We discuss a constructivist model of epistemic development based on the notion of increased complexity. This model proposes that as cognitive complexity increases by means of cycles of validation and invalidation, personal epistemic assumptions shift from positivism to constructivism, and preferred worldviews shift from mechanism to organicism – as defined by Pepper’s (1942) taxonomy of world hypotheses. We report two studies in which we found, as predicted, a significant relationship among overall cognitive complexity, constructivist epistemic assumptions, and an organicist worldview. However, our attempt to discriminate the effects of the two theoretical dimensions of cognitive complexity (differentiation and integration) was not successful. Our data also indicate a dichotomy of ways of knowing: One is characterized by cognitive simplicity, objectvist epistemic assumptions, and a mechanistic/formistic worldview; the other is characterized by cognitive complexity, constructivist epistemic assumptions, and an organicist/contextualist worldview.

In their article on ethics, Raskin and Debany (this issue) raise a number of important issues that merit discussion and have implications for a constructivist stance on ethics, an issue that has dogged constructivist and social constructionist theory and has, in the past, been the focus of a good deal of debate. In my response to their article, I focus on two issues before going on to consider what these imply for a constructivist ethics. The first is the status of “reality”; drawing on the work of French philosophers, discursive psychology, and symbolic interactionism, I argue that the constructivist conception of reality has been widely misunderstood and will outline what I regard as a defensible construction of reality. The second issue concerns the relationship between the individual and the social world; drawing again on earlier work in microsociology, I argue that the “constructed” individual must be understood as emerging from the social realm rather than preexisting it, and I argue for personal construct psychology as a candidate for filling the subjectivity “gap” in social constructionism. Finally, I use these conceptualizations of reality and the person to argue for an ethical stance of “radical doubt” for constructivism.

Stojnov (1996) has argued that personal construct psychology furnishes us with a universalist, as opposed to a relativist, ethics. This is a universalism of form rather than content of construing: we have a “personal responsibility of knowledge”. The author critiques Stojnov’s view, arguing that the Sociality Corollary does indeed provide an ethical basis for Kelly’s thought. However, he contends that the construct universalism/relativism is of limited value, and that the apparent relativism in constructivism provides a valuable guide to moral construing. It is argued that the certainty that comes from moral absolutism readily leads not to moral action, but to moralism. The foundationlessness of constructivism provides a valuable counterbalance to this moralism.

George Kelly’s personal construct theory (PCT) has been accused of disregarding the role of emotion in human life. This charge originates from a misunderstanding of PCT’s basic assumptions. Kelly deals with experiences commonly called “emotional” in terms of dimensions of transition according to a genuinely constructivist epistemology. A review of the literature shows few elaborations of Kelly’s original formulation of constructs relating to transitions, and even some contributions critical of Kelly’s approach to emotions. This article rebuts the criticisms while making clear the epistemological and theoretical bases of Kelly’s treatment of transitional experiences, its peculiarities, and its role in the diagnostic/therapeutic process. Relevance: It deals with the notion of emotion from a genuinely constructivist epistemology such as that envisioned by Kelly’s personal construct theory.

As the constructivist movement spreads throughout the contemporary psychological literature, the meaning of the term constructivism is loosening and has become permeable to rather different approaches. This excessive permeability is one of the reasons why in recent years there has been a proliferation of the reasons why in recent years there has been a proliferation of lables suggested by several authors to point out relevant differences under the umbrella of constructivism/constructionism. In this article, we attempt to contribute to a systematization of the field by using the knowledge/reality relationship as a metatheoretical criterion of differentiation among the several psychological perspectives on personal knowledge. In doing so we fix certain terms to the different views of knowledge, suggesting their discriminative use. Brief references to the psychotherapeutic approaches based on the metatheoretical perspectives considered make clear their different implications at the applied level.

As the constructivist movement spreads throughout the contemporary psychological literature, the meaning of the term constructivism is loosening and has become permeable to rather different approaches. This excessive permeability is one of the reasons why in recent years there has been a proliferation of labels suggested by several authors to point out relevant differences under the umbrella of constructivism/ constructionism. In this article, we attempt to contribute to a systematization of the field by using the knowledge/reality relationship as a metatheoretical criterion of differentiation among the several psychological perspectives on personal knowledge. In doing so we fix certain terms to the different views of knowledge, suggesting their discriminative use. Brief references to the psychotherapeutic approaches based on the metatheoretical perspectives considered make clear their different implications at the applied clinical level.

Barbara Held has taken postmodern therapists to task for making “reality claims” when they have presumably committed themselves to an antirealist epistemology. She is concerned that by focusing so exclusively on individual client narratives, they ignore important aspects of the client’s “extralinguistic” world. Held suggests that constructivist therapists adopt a “modest realism” within which they could (a) tailor therapy methods to individual clients, (b) further systemize therapeutic principles, (c) give extralinguistic reality its due, and (d) make truth claims. The authors argue that the problems she identifies derive largely from the distinctions with which she insists on framing the debate. They agree that constructivists are not always crystal clear about the implications of their epistemology, but it would accomplish little if they were to retreat to the realist posture she proposes.