ABSTRACT
One of the most exciting innovations in recent clinical practice has been the development of Collaborative/Therapeutic Assessment, commonly abbreviated C/TA1 (Finn & Tonsager, 1997; Finn, 2007). This approach to psychological assessment seeks to break down the boundary between assessment and psychotherapy by a planned use of the assessment as a therapeutic intervention. Finn and Tonsager (1997) contrast informationgathering and therapeutic modes of assessment and note that a) in the former the goal is the accurate diagnosis of the client and the facilitation of communication between professionals, whereas in the latter the goal is for the client to develop new understandings of herself; b) in therapeutic assessment, the assessor is a participant-observer as opposed to an “objective observer”; c) in therapeutic assessment, the tests are seen as tools to increase empathy so that the assessor may better access the client’s inner life rather than standardized samples of behavior for nomothetic comparison; and d) in therapeutic assessment, the focus is more on the client’s subjective experience rather than on the scores themselves (p. 397). Research has demonstrated the superiority of C/TA in terms of client satisfaction, compliance with post-assessment recommendations, and initial alliance in subsequent psychotherapeutic relationships (Poston & Hanson, 2010).
