Projective personality assessment of anxiety: A critical appraisal

Abstract

The assessment of an individual's psychological state-thoughts, feelings, behaviors-is an enormous part of a psychologist's life. Indeed, the story of clinical psychology prior to World War II is the story of psychological assessment, from Lightner Witmer's first psychological clinic to Army Alpha and Army Beta to the Wechsle-Bellevue intelligence test (Plante, 2011). Unfortunately, as is the case in the development of most scienti fic fields, not all early development was actually progressive. Many health fields in their infancy embrace non-supported (outside of anecdotal stories or personal experience) theories, treatments, or measures of assessment. In medicine, for example, we have humorism, which led to bleeding and cupping (Hart, 2001), or animal magnetism, which led to mesmerism and channeling the magnetic fluid (Baker, 1990). In clinical psychology, many today view the continued use of projective measures of personality to assess psychopathology as akin to a physician who uses trepanning to treat epilepsy-as a pseudoscienti fic practice which should have no place in a modern, scienti fic field. There are, however, numerous supporters of the use of projective techniques and tests to assess for psychopathology in both clinical practice and academia (Hogan, 2005; Hojnoski, Morrison, Brown, & Matthews, 2006).