ABSTRACT
Psychological assessment is, most simply, an effort to describe a patient’s capacities and vulnerabilities based on the administration, scoring, and integrated interpretation of evidence-based measures. This chapter discusses a way in which the psychoanalytically informed teacher of psychological assessment might help students create accessible, useful reports. It offers a three-part, psychoanalytically informed model that facilitates the report writing process and then present a clinical illustration. The model is designed to assist students in developing and organizing theoretically derived inferences into easily understood narratives. Writing psychological assessment reports is a vehicle through which students practice this re-integration. Just as integrating assessment and non-assessment coursework facilitates learning in both domains, learning how to write test reports refines case formulation, clinical feedback, and professional writing skills. Molly’s confusion about her thoughts and feelings and the ways in which her efforts to manage consistently fail ultimately leaving her in a serious bind.
