Existential Assessment

Collaborative Therapeutic Neuropsychological Assessment

“…Psychological testing has historically been looked upon with disdain, especially by humanistic practitioners, because testing was seen as a dehumanizing endeavor where the patient is viewed as an ''object'' to be observed and reduced to categories, traits, and diagnoses (Dana & Leech, 1974). Traditionally, psychological testing was conducted in a ''top down'' manner, with the evaluator providing a series of tests to a passive patient.…”

“…Dana and Leech trace the background of this philosophy to classical Newtonian thought where the external environment is considered separate from human beings' subjective experience and thus can only be known through objective observation. The fallout of this philosophical assumption was the dehumanizing of individual subjective experience and the objectification of humankind (Dana & Leech, 1974). Psychological testing was seen as a tool of this dehumanizing process.…”

Ethical and professional considerations in psychological assessment.

“…One exception is an extensive literature on existential and humanistic approaches to assessment (e.g., Dana & Leech, 1974;Petzelt & Craddick, 1978). Blatt (1975) and Sugarman (1978), on the one hand, and Munter (1975) and others, on the other, debated whether psychodiagnostic assessment inherently lacks humanistic value.…”

How Therapeutic Assessment became humanistic.

“…In addition to our affinity for humanistic psychology, during the early 1990s we became aware of the writings of psychologists who practiced psychological assessment within an explicitly human science or humanistic framework, primarily Fischer (1970Fischer ( , 1972Fischer ( , 1978Fischer ( , 1979Fischer ( , 1982Fischer ( , 1985Fischer ( /1994, but also Dana (1982;1984a;1984b;Dana & Graham, 1976;Dana & Leech, 1974), Craddick (1972Craddick ( , 1974, and others. Contact with these thinkers helped us develop a philosophical underpinning for what we were doing in assessment already.…”