The Founder of the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology
Fay Fransella started her working life as an occupational therapist, trained to work in both psychological and physical therapeutic contexts. Her first research, with the assistance of a clinical psychologist, was to see whether occupational therapy (OT) was of any use to the many psychiatric long-stay patients that attended the OT departments.
The successful outcome of that research lead her to take a degree in psychology at University College London and then train as a Clinical Psychologist. Her PhD degree on stuttering in 1965 resulted in her first book, with her supervisor Reg Beech as co-author (Beech & Fransella, 1968, Research and Experiment in Stuttering Oxford: Pergamon Press).
After three years as a University Teacher she spent the next five years doing full-time research supported by personal research grants. The most important one proved to be that from the Mental Health Research Fund to apply personal construct psychology to understanding why some people stutter. The results of that research were published in her 1972 book Personal Change and Reconstruction: Research on a Treatment of Stuttering (London: Academic Press).
Throughout that period and in subsequent years, there was an increasing demand for her to teach and give workshops on personal construct psychology. Her travels extended from the United Kingdom to North America and then Australia. Much of the early interest coming from speech and language therapists.
Her most influential book, published a year earlier, was Inquiring Man, (1971, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books) co-authored with Don Bannister. That was written for the target readership of university psychology students. It resulted in an almost impossible demand for both authors to speak at Psychological Societies of many universities. It went to three editions and finally went out of print in 2000. It is now being prepared for publication as an e-book by the publishers Taylor and Francis. She is the author of many other books and journal articles on personal construct psychology.
In 1977, she convened the first International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology in Oxford, UK. These congresses have continued to the present day every two years. Click on International Congresses for more information.
In the ten years she spent as a Senior Lecturer and then Reader at the University of London's Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, the PCP demands increasingly conflicted with her teaching and university work. In 1980 she decided to take early retirement and to set up the
the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology. She was awarded an Emeritus Readership in Clinical Psychology by the University of London. She was appointed visiting Professor in Personal Construct Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in 2001.
She now works from her home in Cornwall, UK in collaboration with Nick Reed who lives in London, UK. Their work covers courses, as well as services to organisations, and services to individuals. She has particular responsibility for maintaining and servicing the PCP Collection.
Her desire to contribute to making personal construct psychology as widely known as possible seems to be bearing fruit, judging by recent events. First, in the year 2000, she was asked to take part in a videotaped interview for the British Psychological Society's archives - that, of course, was largely about personal construct psychology. Second, she was one of twelve psychologists to be asked to write a chapter for the British Psychological Society's Centenary book - that also contains a considerable amount of personal construct psychology. Lastly, she has recently edited the first International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology, which is currently in press with the publishers, John Wiley & Son.
To contact the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology,
please e-mail Professor Fay Fransella