ABSTRACT
Our intention in writing this book was to give students a broad overview of the multifaceted and diverse field of clinical psychology. We tried to achieve this goal by describing where clinical psychology came from, what it looks like now, and our thoughts are about where the field is going. If we have achieved our goal, then the reader can appreciate the challenge of briefly drawing some general conclusions about clinical psychology. To help organize our thoughts, we return to an idea we introduced in Chapter 1 when we discussed characteristics of the field. We stated that clinical psychology is characterized by four emphases: science, maladjustment, individual, and helping. As we draw the book to a close, let’s revisit these four emphases.
