Teaching and Learning Issues in an Advanced Course in Personality Assessment

This chapter describes the teaching-learning process in a second (advanced) course in personality assessment, taught by the first author, from a psychodynamic-experiential approach, and informed by the second and third authors, when they were class participants. Although some aspects of the assessment process have been informed by research, presented later in the chapter, other aspects of the interpretive process have been informed by the work ofSchachtel (1966), by the human science approach described by Polkinghorne (1983) and Fischer (1985), and by the psychodynamic approach to interpretation described by Rapaport (Rapaport, Gill, and Schafer, 1968), Mayman (1968, 1977), Schafer (1978), and P. Lerner (1991). Most of all, the approach to the course was determined by the work of Potash (1989).