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BOOK REVIEW
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THE ESSENTIAL
PRACTITIONER'S HANDBOOK OF
PERSONAL CONSTRUCT PSYCHOLOGY
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edited by Fay Fransella
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London: Wiley,
2005,
Paperback, 308 pages, £26.99 |
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reviewed by
David Green (Leeds,
UK)
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This
book is an interesting byproduct of a much more substantial tome, the
recently
published International Handbook of
Personal Construct Psychology (also edited
by Fransella; Fransella, 2003). The avowed aim of this shortened
edition is to boil down the
original’s contents into a nutritious meal fit for the proverbial
hard-pressed
practitioner. Fransella candidly admits in the preface that this
initiative for
a Mark 2 version came from the publisher Wiley rather than the editor
herself,
so we might reasonably suppose that a cheaper shorter publication was
also
designed to attract a wider readership than its weighty progenitor. The
risk in
this eminently understandable strategy is that chapters that were not
initially
written with the practitioner audience in mind don’t 'hit the mark' as
well as
a purpose-built volume might have done.
The
Essential Practitioner’s Handbook is organised in four sections. It
starts with
three 'What’s it all about?' chapters including a characteristically
feisty
piece by Don Bannister entitled 'The Logic of Passion' that challenges
the
traditional separation of intellect and emotion.
The
middle two sections look to provide the practical heart of the
publication by describing
a range of PCP assessment techniques followed by 16 separate
contributors
reporting various ways in which they have employed PCP ideas to promote
change
in a range of clinical and organizational contexts. In the techniques
section the
chapters on grid use (by Bell)
and mapping patterns of
dependency (by Walker) are
models of clarity that probably
could leave a busy practitioner with a sense of "I can see when I could
do
that". Denicolo’s piece on using more qualitative approaches to PCP
assessment
also succeeds in equipping the novice reader with some immediately
useable
tricks of the PCP trade. It is not so easy to pass on the nous needed
to make
effective interventions in the complicated lives of individuals and
organizations – especially when, as with Procter’s chapter on family
therapy,
you have less than four pages to get your message across. For example
Sewell’s
account of his use of PCP principles in the treatment of PTSD might
well
intrigue a fellow therapist to read more, but I doubt even experienced
practitioners in the field could find a way to immediately embrace the
ideas
conveyed in this format.
The
final section is a brief two chapter 'Whither PCP?' conclusion.
Ironically for
a psychology that so celebrates our capacity for anticipation I found
these
forward looking musings oddly uninspiring. Neimeyer and Baldwin wryly
report
how fashionable constructivist ideas have now become in
psychotherapeutic
circles, though whether Kelly himself would have enjoyed this
postmodern company
is a moot point. Fransella’s finale considers future extensions of the
range of
convenience of PCP beyond its traditional territory of applied
professional
psychology into the fields of music, history and even the construing
capacity
of plants. However I doubt that piano players and organic gardeners
were quite
the hard-pressed practitioners that Wiley had in mind as potential
purchasers
of this volume.
So
what do you get for your money? A solid up-to-date PCP resource book
that is
well-referenced and includes helpful appendices covering technical
terms and
directing readers to more specialist publications in the field.
Something of a
whistle-stop tour of the range of ways PCP has been applied to
applications in
a wide range of settings. All this represents a useful contribution to
the
field – it’s just not what I would term a practitioner’s handbook. I
know I get
some of the same reaction when traditional academic events purport to
be
workshops. Ah well it wouldn’t do if we all used our constructs the
same way…
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REFERENCES
Fransella, F. (Ed.) (2003). International handbook of personal
construct psychology. London: Wiley.
Fransella,
F. (Ed.) (2005). The essential
practitioner's handbook of personal construct psychology. London:
Wiley.
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REFERENCE
Green, D. (2005). Review of: Fransella, F. (Ed.) (2005). The essential practitioner's handbook of Personal Construct
Psychology. London:
Wiley. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 2, 10-11.
(Retrieved from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp05/green-fransella05.html)
Contact: D.R.Green@leeds.ac.uk
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Received: 19 Oct 2005 - Accepted: 19 Oct 2005 -
Published: 1 Nov 2005 |
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