The Interpersonal Circumplex as a Structural Model in Clinical Research: Examples from Group Psychotherapy, Interpersonal Problems, and Personality Disorders

I entered psychology with a strong background in natural sciences and mathematics. I also have a skeptical personality. I, therefore, gradually noticed the lack of consensual agreement between therapists facing the same clinical material. Two experts facing the same patient at a case conference often disagreed radically about the nature of the patient’s difficulties. Such experiences, repeated many times, led me to feel that research was essential to clarify the nature of the therapeutic endeavor. As a newcomer to psychotherapy research with a psychoanalytic bent, personality change was at the core of my thinking about therapy. I was interested in the therapeutic change that occurs with longer-term psychotherapies; it seemed that a major claim of these therapies was that they could lead to changes in personality that were unlikely to occur without therapy. Three approaches to personality appealed to the mathematical side of my personality. Kelly’s (1955) personal construct psychology helped elucidate personality as an individual’s processes of the construction of reality while providing an axiomatic account of the structure of personality and an appealing account of the nature of personality change. Kelly thus transcended the idiographic-nomothetic split in psychology. From a very different perspective, both the interpersonal circumplex (Leary, 1957; Wiggins, 1982; Wiggins & Broughton, 1985) and the Five Factor Model (Digman, 1989; Goldberg, 1992; John, 1990; McCrae, 1992; McCrae & Costa,