Allegories for Psychotherapy, Teaching, and Supervision by Mark A. Kunkel

Author:Mark A. Kunkel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319959276
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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A few semesters ago, and in the interest of safeguarding the sanctity of these encounters it may in fact be many years ago, I taught a graduate course in Psychological Assessment. I introduced this course at the outset as far too ambitious in its scope and aspiration for the short semester allocated for our work. I apologized for the necessarily cursory and introductory nature of our treatment of rich and complicated material, and we chose, instead of flitting scantily around various tests, to dwell more deeply in the project of evaluation in the interest of understanding. I taught students along the way that the etymology of the word assessment relates to the word assay, and implies “sitting beside so as to weigh.” We bring psychological assessment as a gift when we sit beside a life, to weigh it in our hands. This process is far removed from testing, or mere administration of measures as measures, or efficiency of diagnosis.

Martin was a student in this class, and was openly and abidingly skeptical of the conceptual. He was eager to accumulate the techniques of measurement and diagnosis, honing only toward a credential-oriented justification for our work, to satisfy licensure requirements. He was therefore resistant to preliminary and hard-won familiarity with the psychometric underpinnings of assessment methods or instruments, or to acquainting himself with the rich implications of the project of assessment as an aesthetic. He voiced his displeasure with me and with the class project openly and repeatedly, and was clearly frustrated with the disjuncture between his experience of our work and his notions about what an assessment class ought to encompass. This crevasse yawned yet more wide during the course of the semester, and I was unable either to accommodate his desire or to persuade him to align himself with mine. As is the case in some interpersonal settings, he assuaged the solitude of his concerns by fomenting and organizing a small but evident buzz of dissenters and dissatisfied consumers. Their resistance became palpable in our gatherings, as among the twenty of us those four or five sat sullen and apathetic and stinging, rather than warmly collaborative in our pedagogical hive, as I certainly would have wished.

I did what I could to speak this process, and even to triangulate its naming in the dance of assessment in a careful and boundaried fashion. I did what I could to conform the contours of the class to the protestation and critique of Martin and his companions in dissatisfaction and dissent. I did what I could to let him know that this course was not comprehensive, or intended to equip him or others for any independent credentialed practice, but rather to provide a conceptual overview of measurement and of clinical assessment as a humble, tentative, collaborative endeavor. All of this fell on somewhat deaf, and increasingly reddened and irritated, ears. As the semester widened into its end, the gulf between me and most students, and Martin and his colleagues, was not only evident but openly adversarial.

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