PCP eludes classification: George Kelly (1965) wrote:
‘I have been so puzzled over the early labelling of personal construct theory as “cognitive” that several years ago I set out to write another short book to make it clear that I wanted no part of cognitive theory. The manuscript was about a third completed when I gave a lecture at Harvard University with the title, “Personal Construct Theory as a Line of Inference.” Following the lecture, Professor Gordon Allport explained to the students that my theory was not a “cognitive” theory but an “emotional” theory. Later the same afternoon, Dr. Henry Murray called me aside and said, “You know, don’t you, that you are really an existentialist.”
Since that time I stepped into almost all the open manholes that psychological theorists can possibly fall into. For example, in Warsaw, where I thought my lecture on personal construct theory would be an open challenge to dialectical materialism, the Poles, who had been conducting some seminars on personal construct theory before my arrival, explained to me that “personal construct theory was just exactly what dialectical materialism stood for.” Along the way also I have found myself classified in a volume on personality theories as one of the “learning theorists,” a classification that seems to me so patently ridiculous that I have gotten no end of amusement out of it. A few years ago an orthodox psychoanalyst insisted, after hearing me talk about psychotherapy, that, regardless of what I might say about Freud, and regardless even of my failure to fall in the apostolic succession to which a personal psychoanalysis entitled one, I was really “a psychoanalyst”. This charge was repeated by a couple of psychoanalytically sophisticated psychiatrists in London last fall, and nothing I could say would shake their conviction. I have, of course, been called a Zen Buddhist, and last fall one of our former students, now a distinguished psychologist, who was invited back to give a lecture, spent an hour and a half in a seminar corrupting my students with the idea that I was really a “behaviorist.’