Advancing Personality Assessment - The Hermeneutic Approach (1.5 CEs)

Contemporary psychotherapeutic practice including, but not limited to, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic psychotherapy, relational and intersubjective psychotherapies, narrative psychotherapy, and modern forms of family therapy, often rely on case formulations that call for a broader and more enlarged approach to the assessment process. But contemporary therapists all too often ignore what an assessment might bring to their practice. We would like to suggest some changes in the assessment process that may better accommodate these practitioners. This symposium explores such an enlarged role for personality assessment by way of a paradigmatic change, in which a rigorous but more encompassing philosophy of human science, that not only accommodates the history of the progress of personality assessment, but also suggests an underlying meta-methodological schema for future progress. This necessarily involves a meta-analysis of how we do assessment: for example, how we think about the thought processes we engage in when we interpret disparate results. This is where a hermeneutic meta-methodology might be most valuable. The three highly experienced clinical psychologists, who come from different backgrounds from all over the country, will define and explore the heuristic use of hermeneutics as foundational for assessment practice. In the spirit of our greatest contemporary personality assessors: Paul Lerner, Bruce L. Smith, Connie Fischer, and Irving Weiner, please join our symposium.

Chair

Steven Anthony Sola | Private Practice 

Goals & Objectives

1. Participants will learn fundamental concepts and primary sources in hermeneutics. 
2. Participants will learn differences and conceptual claims for human and natural science approached to personality assessment. 
3. Participants will learn how hermeneutics informs personality assessment theory, procedures, process, and outputs. 
4. Participants will learn a hermeneutic framework for the conduct of personality assessment based on current models of intersubjectivity.