ABSTRACT

It’s New Year’s Eve; name your year. Amid the tumultuous joy, the loud music, the revelers packed tightly on the dance floor, you sit back just for a moment and take stock. This is the stuff of which New Year’s resolutions are made. It is natural, almost in the genes, to simultaneously look back and look ahead at important moments in our lives. So it is as clinical neuropsychology enters the twenty-first century. What have we accomplished? Where are we going? What are the challenges and threats from outside and from within our profession? This chapter represents one set of answers to these questions. In preparing to write this chapter, I consulted several existing reviews of the status of clinical neuropsychology (Benton, 1987, 1992; Bigler, 1991; Costa, 1998; Parsons, 1991; Puente, 1992; Rourke, 1991, 1995). My esteemed predecessors have already mentioned some of what I will discuss. I do not intend to comprehensively cover all our noteworthy achievements, and I do not present an exhaustive list of the challenges that face us. Instead, my goal is to highlight some of the important issues that face clinical neuropsychology now and tomorrow.