SUCCESSFUL counseling or psycho-^D therapy implies that changes take place in the personality of the client or patient. The problem of the psychologist who seeks to analyze conscious, deliberate attempts to alter behavior in a clinical situation, lies essentially in determining specifically what changes take place during treatment and what conditions are necessary to produce them. Many things have been suggested as "essential changes" but so far there is almost a complete dearth of reliable evidence, aside from clinical interpretations, to bolster the constructs which have been advanced. Among the terms in common use which supposedly define such changes are release of feelings or tensions, emotional re-education, making the unconscious conscious, modifying responses, reorganization or reintegration of personality, modification of goals or pathways to goals, etc.Such terms are so schematic, so indefinite or so circular that the very existence of the psychological events to which they refer cannot be determined by objective measures or else every event considered fits the theory. Changes in "needs" or in "attitudes" or in "traits" have also been suggested as occurring in therapeutic situations as well as in normal personality development. So far there has been little systematic J A condensation of a portion of a Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Graduate School of the Ohio State University in 1943. Acknowledgments are gratefully made to Professors
Successful counseling or psychotherapy implies that changes take place in the personality of the client or patient. The problem of the psychologist who seeks to analyze conscious, deliberate attempts to alter behavior in a clinical situation, lies essentially in determining specifically what changes take place during treatment and what conditions are necessary to produce them. Many things have been suggested as "essential changes" but so far there is almost a complete dearth of reliable evidence, aside from clinical interpretations, to bolster the constructs which have been advanced. Among the terms in common use which supposedly define such changes are release of feelings or tensions, emotional reeducation, making the unconscious conscious, modifying responses, reorganization or reintegration of personality, modification of goals or pathways to goals, etc.Such terms are so schematic, so indefinite or so circular that the very existence of the psychological events to which they refer cannot be determined by objective measures or else every event considered fits the theory. Changes in "needs" or in "attitudes" or in "traits" have also been suggested as occurring in therapeutic situations as well as in normal personality development. So far there has been little systematic application of these concepts to the artificially induced changes occurring during treatment. As for trait constructs, in clinical work these have usually been applied to manifestations of ability or capacity which the counselor is more interested in unmasking than in modifying.It becomes imperative to search for constructs which can be investigated with the usual safeguards of objectivity and reliability. When and where to apply available and plausible measures is at present a matter of feasibility rather than desirability. The methods of measurement are * A condensation of a portion of a Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Graduate School of the Ohio State University in 1943. Acknowledgments are gratefully made to Pro-
MAJOR problems are created in the training of psychologists by the great breadth of the field of psychology and its lack of fundamental, unifying general principles. The overworked cliche, "first a psychologist and then a clinician" undoubtedly has some residual meaning where the field of mental health is concerned since "psychologist" still stands for someone with investigative interests, even though his interests may but rarely be supported by actual research activity.If we ignore, for the moment, the investigative aspects of psychology in the mental health field, we find psychologists engaged in an amazing variety of activities, many of which are but remotely related to others. In a recent book by Rubenstein and Lorr, entitled Clinical Practice in Psychology, each of the following activities merits a separate chapter: training schools for delinquents; state hospitals for adults; community guidance centers; the government agencies including the VA, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Public Health Service; child and adult psychiatric clinics; private practice; old-age counseling centers; clinics for alcoholics; college student counseling bureaus; industrial counseling bureaus; courts for adults and juveniles; prisons and penitentiaries; and also rehabilitation centers for the physically handicapped; school systems; and, finally, specialized clinics for the poor reader, the deaf and hard of hearing, and the speech handicapped.These, of course, are the locales in which psychologists work when trying to diagnose, treat, do research, train, and administer for children and adults with mental health problems. It would be very simple if the work could be divided into two or three categories which would meaningfully cut across all of the locales. Unfortunately, that is not quite the case, as our present lack of a well-organized and systematized knowledge of the structure of human personality, in both its normal and abnormal variations, still requires that the psychologist in a particular work locale have 41
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