I received a request to possibly say something about what it is like for Personal Constructivists on this side of the pond.  I am editor [actually just became Contributing Editor] of “Constructive Interventionist,” the magazine of the Personal Construct Psychology Centre. The Centre is associated with the Psychology Department at the University of Hertfordshire and is producing some informative workshops about PCP.  We are one of four main groups, as I see it, in the UK. Another group in the UK is the Personal Construct Psychology Association. Both groups are remarkable in that many of its practitioners and trainees are not psychologists.  If anything, the UK scene with PCP is characterised by a mix of psychologists and people from other walks of life – such as speech and language communication therapists, social workers, business people, clergy and other varieties (I am sure that the wide range of occupations involved with PCP owes a debt to Prof Fay Fransella who did very much to pioneer the establishment of PCP in the UK). There is also the EPCA (European Personal Construct Psychology Association), active in a number of EU states.  Probably, they are the most assiduous in running conferences in the European scene and publishing the conference proceedings.  Finally, I would classify the fourth major grouping as a loose group which works via universities and has its consultancies in clinical psychology, the business world, education and so on.  This group contributes more to international conferences and is seen more in published texts and articles.

As a whole, the therapy side of PCP in the UK isn’t large – approximately 47 qualified practitioners for the whole of the UK, including Wales and Scotland!!  I should know, as I am the Registrar for this group.  Currently, the UK is moving ever so slowly and very contentiously towards compulsory State Registration. At the moment, literally anyone can call themselves a psychologist or a psychotherapist and they are completely beyond any form of governance.  The effects of this compulsory registration are not yet clear and there is a lot of uncertainty as to who will be the registration body and whether such a body will be able to reflect the needs and interests of therapists at large.  It looks as if the body may take the form of the Health Professions Registration Council in which all psychotherapies would be asked to conform to a singular definition with demands for particular types of diagnosis and so on.

In the clinical world, the UK also has a distinct Personal Construct contingent, which had as its flagship the work of David Winter (1992).  The Constructivism side of matters is somewhat suppressed in the UK.  In fact, if you asked many of our practitioners about the difference between Constructivism and PCP they would tend to defer to others to answer such a question!! [Oh, present persons excepted, of course].

Another feature of the scene here is that the Cognitive Behavioural Therapists are in the ascendancy, being feted in extremis by the political processes.  They themselves--I am one as well--find that a good deal of the pressure is commercially driven, either through the state health care provision or through insurance and EAP provision – I believe you would call this “managed healthcare.”

A most interesting angle about the work of Personal Construct Therapists and Cognitive Behaviour Therapists has been that of David Winter in terms of discriminating between the two groups and how they differ in actual practice (Winter & Watson, 2006).  This is interesting and it is the sort of thing which scientists have had thrust upon them as well.  What people say they do and what they actually do can be different things.  My own position is that quite often our cognitive therapists operate a very constructed environment between themselves and their clients, as do PCP practitioners.  However, PCP practitioners actually operate a very cognitive behavioural environment between themselves and their clients at times.  The end effect is that differences emerge in specific localities of the procedures – such as the valuing of homework, the implementation of specific experiments and so on.  Overall, Multi Modal therapy and PCP have the chance to be quite compatible.

I hope I have given a few reflections of the British scene. We are small, but still here and also looking towards evidence based validations of Personal Construct Therapy (Winter, 2003; Viney et al., 2005).  There is a sudden and swift development here of positive psychology. One wonders whether some joining of interest between that movement and the PCP movement in this country will eventually occur.

Dennis Bury is a Chartered Psychologist, Cognitive Behavioural Therapist, and a Personal Construct Therapist.  He is an adjunct professor for Syracuse University Abroad.

References

Viney, L. L., Metcalfe, C., & Winter, D. A. (2005). The effectiveness of personal construct psychotherapy: A met-analysis. In D. Winter and L. L. Viney (Eds.), Personal Construct Psychotherapy: Advances in theory, practice and research (p. 347–364). London: Hurr Publishers.                         

Winter, D. A.(2003). The evidence base for personal construct psychotherapy. In F. Fransella (Ed.), The International Handbook for Personal Construct Psychotherapy (p. 265–272). London: Wiley.

Winter, D. A. (1992). Personal construct psychology in clinical practice: Theory, research and applications. London: Routledge.