Pioneer of a radical people-centred theory of psychology
Professor Fay Fransella, who has died aged 85, devoted most of her life to promoting a view of psychology centred on people. Personal construct psychology (PCP), a radical approach developed by an American, George Kelly, was for Fay something of an oasis in the "psychological desert" she found during her clinical training. The introductory book that she wrote on it with Don Bannister, Inquiring Man (1971), inspired a generation of psychologists, including me, who had become disillusioned by university courses dominated by behavioural approaches.
The book's message was that psychology could actually be about people, whose views, or constructions, of the world should be taken seriously, rather than about rats and pigeons. Not only that, but people could actively make choices about their worlds rather than being passive victims of their histories or biochemistry. Other highly influential books among Fay's more than 100 publications included A Manual for Repertory Grid Technique (1977), with Bannister and Richard Bell, detailing the approach's principal assessment method, and the International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology (2003), which she edited.
Fay was born in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, to a mother 29 years younger than her father, who had retired from his post as a provincial governor in southern Sudan. She had a younger brother, and her mother died when Fay was six years old. Her schooling was disrupted, not least by the family's evacuation from Jersey in anticipation of invasion, and she eventually left school before the sixth form because she was not considered bright enough. She then trained as an occupational therapist and obtained her first job in 1945 at Horton hospital in Epsom, Surrey, which was still treating wartime casualties, though later reverted to its former psychiatric use.
Despite becoming head of the largest occupational-therapy department in the country, Fay developed an interest in psychological research that led her, in her early 30s, to take evening classes for the O- and A-levels that she needed to embark on a psychology degree. She completed it at University College London in 1961, and then trained as a clinical psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry in south-east London.
After her training, she remained at the institute as a lecturer, and in 1965 completed a PhD on stuttering. In this period, she met Kelly for the first time, when he gave one of a series of seminars at Brunel University for a group calling themselves the "Kelly Club", and encountered repertory grid technique.
Her subsequent applications of PCP to the understanding and treatment of stuttering, supported by the Mental Health Research Fund, were groundbreaking. She demonstrated that stuttering is the stutterer's "way of life", whereas for him or her the world of fluency is relatively devoid of meaning. The therapeutic approach that she developed was based upon elaboration of the meaningfulness of fluency for the stutterer, but has much broader applicability for the treatment of clinical problems.
In 1971, Fay was appointed senior lecturer in clinical psychology at the Royal Free hospital school of medicine, University of London, where her research included the application of PCP to eating disorders, and reader in 1977. That year she was largely responsible for organising the first international congress in PCP, which has continued biennially ever since.
In 1982, she took early retirement to set up the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology in London. The first such centre, it aimed "to give personal construct psychology to anyone who wants it". It was a founder member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP), and ran the first training course leading to the registration of personal construct psychotherapists with the UKCP. It also undertook "diagnostic research" with organisations: an early contract involved British Airways.
Fay was awarded a fellowship of the British Psychological Society, and in 2001 a visiting professorship at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, where she contributed to the doctorate in clinical psychology course – the only such in Britain with a strong personal construct component – into her 80s. In 2005, the centre she had founded became part of the university's school of psychology, and continues to offer distance-learning courses in PCP to students and professionals round the world.
Fay's life exemplified the spirit of adventure that is central to this approach, and to Kelly's view that no one should be a victim of their biography or history. Her own adventures included learning, in her 20s, to fly a Tiger Moth, and taking a yachtmaster course after being introduced to sailing by her second husband, Roy Hodson, whom she married in 1968.
She is survived by Roy.
• Fay Adah Rachel Fransella, psychologist, born 1 October 1925; died 14 January 2011