ABSTRACT
In his book, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Pyschotherapy, Philip Cushman (1995) proposed the idea that people are products of specific cultural frameworks shaped by moral understandings and local politics. He also argued that clinicians in the field of psychology are all too eager to demonstrate the universality of the psychological processes such as motivation, perception, and emotion and have ignored the individual in his or her own context. In the zest for universal psychological structures, the social, moral, and political constructs of a person have become a threat or impediment to the clinician who strives for more “objective” and “apolitical” psychotherapeutic or assessment process. However, as assessors working with African-American children, adolescents, and families in foster care and impoverished situations, we have found Cushman’s ideas to be true. It is impossible for the assessment process to remain entirely “apolitical” or “ahistorical.” It is difficult to ignore the fact that there is an extremely inequitable distribution of power between assessor and client that creates a question about social justice right from the start. Race, ethnicity, social class, education, age, and language are just some of the ways that the assessor or therapist often differs from their clients and their families, therefore the question becomes how to hold onto the differences while not missing the similarities. This chapter will look at what happens when cultural, political, and social justice issues emerge in the assessment process through two case studies. As the assessments by design often strongly impact a person’s treatment at the very least, we look at how the social and political can be reintegrated into the assessment process. As Samuda (1975/1998) pointed out so long ago, assessments can be very damaging to minorities if the tests are not normed on a sample that is representative of the person being tested as well as if the interpretation does not take environmental factors into account.
