ABSTRACT
The personal and interpersonal character of most therapies has long been acknowledged. It is understood that in one manner or another the therapist participates in the ways clients change their lives. Intimacy, albeit of a specialized sort, is assumed, and its positive and problematic aspects are addressed in professional training and literature. In contrast, psychological assessment has been more closely grounded in the tradition of laboratory science, the goal being to obtain objective knowledge about a subject’s characteristics. Standardization – of materials, instructions, scoring, and interpretation – is meant to control potential variance in ndings that would be due either to assessor characteristics or to transactions between assessor and subject. Professional training in assessment therefore emphasizes standardized procedures. For example, rapport is addressed not as an interpersonal relationship, but as a condition that results in optimal test output. Although test ndings may be regarded as presenting a penetrating, and in this sense intimate, portrait, intimacy as a relationship is not often associated with assessment.
