Individualizing Psychological Assessment: A Collaborative and Therapeutic Approach

by Constance T. Fischer

Book Overview

Assessments by psychologists, educators, and other human-service professionals too often end with the client being reported in terms of scores, bell-shaped curves, traits, psychodynamic forces, or diagnostic labels. Individualizing Psychological Assessment uses these classification devices in ways that facilitate returning from them to the individual's life, both during the assessment session and in written reports. The book presents...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805815864
• ISBN13: 9780805815863
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 424 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

An Existential Approach to Psychological Assessment

If you have ever had your own reservations about the nature and use of assessment in contemporary clinical practice, thinking it involves unequal power dynamics, focuses on abstract generalities rather rich individualized descriptions, and alienates and objectifies the client rather than serves the client as a means for growth and therapeutic insight, maybe it is time to learn Constance Fischer's individualized human science approach to assessment. Constance was one of the pioneers in developing an existential phenomenological approach to assessment and this book is like a manual for how to put the human being back into the assessment report. The book gives an overview of the critiques of the assumptions of natural scientific assessment, clearing a space for this alternative approach. It then goes on to provide principles for conducting collaborative and individualized assessments that are rooted in the client's life-world. It teaches the clinician how to bring life back into the assessment report through particular attunements, practices and writing styles. The approach to assessment developed here is sophisticated, yet simple, warm, yet effective. It firmly roots assessment practices and outcomes within an existential phenomenological philosophy of the human being, which it makes clear and practical in a deceptively simple yet profound everyday language.