Psychoanalytic Assessment Applications for Different Settings. Edited by Jed A. Yalof and Anthony D. Bram. New York/London:  Routledge, 2021.  204 pp

To understand the relevance of Jed Yalof and Anthony Bram’s edited volume, Psychoanalytic Assessment Applications for Different Settings, the reader must appreciate the disconnection between how students are trained in psychological assessment and how they ultimately practice. When doctoral students in clinical or counseling psychology encounter their early training in personality assessment, invariably they are presented with case examples drawn from a highly delimited range of settings such as psychiatric hospitals, partial hospitals, private practices, and other environments. In these contexts, while the patient might have various difficulties, the primary concern pertains to understanding the target person’s personality and psychopathology. Students’ initial placements often reflect these same biases, leading the student to imagine that personality assessment tools have applicability only in a narrow range of sites.

The training contemporary students receive is consistent with the broad lines of the origins of psychological, and especially personality, assessment. As Robert Holt1 historically describes it in his Foreword to Diagnostic Psychological Testing (originally published in two volumes in and ), David Rapaport worked in a state hospital in Kansas where he was exposed to his colleagues’ efforts to apply individual psychometric tests quite separately from one another in pursuit of an

individual’s diagnosis. Rapaport wanted to see what could be gleaned from the integration of the findings of these individual tests, a project he pursued at the Menninger Clinic and Hospital and eventually at the Winter Veteran Administration Hospital where he tested patients blindly—i.e., without the knowledge of the previous background of the individual or data garnered from others with personal experience with the pati