Full Description
Therapeutic Assessment and Interpersonal Neurobiology shows how collaborative assessment can function as a potent therapeutic intervention—reducing shame, strengthening epistemic trust, and catalyzing meaningful change.
Integrating research on affect regulation, memory reconsolidation, and intersubjectivity with richly detailed case examples, the book demonstrates how psychological tests can be used not only to understand clients, but to help them experience themselves differently. The author highlights common traps that therapists fall into and provides strategies for them to improve their practical skills and enhance the course of treatment to transform clients' lives. The book emphasizes the importance of client collaboration, secure attachment, mentalization, addressing shame, and epistemic trust during psychological interventions. Bridging psychological assessment and modern psychotherapy, this volume provides assessment professionals and trainees with a rigorous, humane, and clinically actionable framework for using tests as instruments of psychological healing.
As a sequel to his influential book, In Our Clients' Shoes: Theory and Techniques of Therapeutic Assessment, the author offers a renewed and transformative vision of psychological assessment grounded in contemporary neuroscience, attachment theory, and decades of clinical practice. This is an invaluable resource for psychologists, particularly those who use the MMPI-2, MMPI-3, Rorschach, AAP, and EMP.
Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction: Bridging the Gap between Recent Developments in Psychotherapy and the Practice of Psychological Assessment
Chapter 2 Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and the Longing to Be Known: Why Personality Assessment Works
Chapter 3 The Many Faces of Empathy in Experiential, Person-Centered, Collaborative Assessment
Chapter 4 Journeys through the Valley of Death: Multimethod Psychological Assessment and Personality Transformation in Long-Term Psychotherapy
Chapter 5 Implications of Recent Research in Neurobiology for Psychological Assessment
Chapter 6 "When I Found My Father": A Rorschach-Evoked Trauma Flashback Helps a Client Heal
Chapter 7 What New Understandings of Shame Mean for Psychological Assessment
Chapter 8 Integrating the Work of Luria and Vygotsky in Modern Personality Assessment: Scaffolding and Collaboration in Therapeutic Assessment
Chapter 9 Therapeutic Assessment in Personality Disorders: Toward the Restoration of Epistemic Trust (written with Jan H. Kamphuis)
Chapter 10 Learning to Navigate Karpman's Triangle: The Healing Potential of Assessing Traumatized Clients
Chapter 11 Using the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System in the Middle of Long-Term Psychotherapy
Chapter 12 Undoing Preoccupied Attachment Defenses Revealed through the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System: The Grief Underlying Cognitive Disconnection
Chapter 13 "If Only I Had Looked!": How Polyvagal Theory Helped a Client Rewrite Her Core Narrative
Chapter 14: Are the Sudden Transformations Seen at Times in Therapeutic Assessment Due to Memory Reconsolidation?
Chapter 15 Final Thoughts
