ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the clinician's attraction to and involvement with the schools is not without ambivalence. While the educational psychologist has been the psychologist most typically involved in the schools, clinicians have evinced an increasing interest in the area of education and have contributed to a significant extent to the role changes and developments in the schools. It may in fact be argued that certain aspects of clinical training enable the child clinician to make a unique and helpful contribution to the schools. Familiarity with the school situation should greatly enhance the value of such contact. The increase in emphasis upon ego-functions in psychoanalytic theory has resulted in an increased emphasis upon the cognitive and structural aspects of functioning in clinical psychology. Such a shift in emphasis may well serve to lessen the distance between the positions of clinicians and educators and to increase the ease of communication between the two professions.
