Beginnings: The Art and Science of Planning Psychotherapy

Rating:
Summary: Developing "New Eyes"
Review: "The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes"--Marcel Proust

"Beginnings, the Art and Science of Planning Psychotherapy" by Mary Jo Peebles-Kleiger, is a tremendous resource not only for working with clients in therapy, but equally in my opinion, for conceptualizing clients based on test findings. Those of us who teach assessment have long needed a text like this. In beautifully clear and compelling prose, Dr. Peebles-Kleiger combines meticulous scholarship with deeply thoughtful and provocative analyses to create a truly integrative framework for understanding those we wish to help.

I am a faculty member in the Clinical Psychology program at the University of Kansas. My specialty is personality assessment. I teach two required courses to our clinical graduate students, one on the "mechanics" of administering, scoring, and interpreting several widely used instruments (e.g., MMPI-2; Rorschach), and a second course on the integration of test findings. In 10 years of teaching assessment and report writing, I have consistently found that gaining expertise in instruments such as the Rorschach and the MMPI-2 is quite challenging for students. However, the greatest difficulty students encounter (and in my experience this is true of even the brightest students) is in developing the ability to integrate and contextualize test findings in a way that creates an accurate, rich and meaningful understanding of "a person."

This process is as fundamental in assessment as in therapy. However, unlike the therapy context in which this often occurs over a series of sessions in which information about a client is accumulated and digested, in the assessment context an examiner must integrate a great deal of information in the form of test findings that comes all at once. To do this sucessfully requires having a broad as well as deep and also flexible understanding of psychological disturbance, and this is just what Dr. Peebles-Kleiger provides in this remarkable book.

I began this review with a quote from Proust because I believe it speaks to the essence of Dr. Peebles-Kleiger new book. This is a text that can give us and our students new eyes.

Rating:
Summary: Developing "New Eyes"
Review: "The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes"--Marcel Proust

"Beginnings, the Art and Science of Planning Psychotherapy" by Mary Jo Peebles-Kleiger, is a tremendous resource not only for working with clients in therapy, but equally in my opinion, for conceptualizing clients based on test findings. Those of us who teach assessment have long needed a text like this. In beautifully clear and compelling prose, Dr. Peebles-Kleiger combines meticulous scholarship with deeply thoughtful and provocative analyses to create a truly integrative framework for understanding those we wish to help.

I am a faculty member in the Clinical Psychology program at the University of Kansas. My specialty is personality assessment. I teach two required courses to our clinical graduate students, one on the "mechanics" of administering, scoring, and interpreting several widely used instruments (e.g., MMPI-2; Rorschach), and a second course on the integration of test findings. In 10 years of teaching assessment and report writing, I have consistently found that gaining expertise in instruments such as the Rorschach and the MMPI-2 is quite challenging for students. However, the greatest difficulty students encounter (and in my experience this is true of even the brightest students) is in developing the ability to integrate and contextualize test findings in a way that creates an accurate, rich and meaningful understanding of "a person."

This process is as fundamental in assessment as in therapy. However, unlike the therapy context in which this often occurs over a series of sessions in which information about a client is accumulated and digested, in the assessment context an examiner must integrate a great deal of information in the form of test findings that comes all at once. To do this sucessfully requires having a broad as well as deep and also flexible understanding of psychological disturbance, and this is just what Dr. Peebles-Kleiger provides in this remarkable book.

I began this review with a quote from Proust because I believe it speaks to the essence of Dr. Peebles-Kleiger new book. This is a text that can give us and our students new eyes.

Rating:
Summary: Advising an integrative approach
Review: Beginnings: The Art & Science Of Planning Psychotherapy by Mary Jo Peebles-Kleiger (a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, and board certified clinical hypnosis expert) is a thoughtful and informative guide drawn from the author's years of experience in the outpatient department of the Menninger Psychiatric Clinic. Individual chapters address a wide range of psychotherapy topics, including enhancing the patient's ability to form an alliance, reality testing and reasoning, trial interventions and feedback, and much, much more. Advising an integrative approach and offering its resources as a primer and sourcebook, Beginnings is highly recommended and an invaluable addition to any professional or academic Psychotherapy Studies or Clinical Psychology reference collection.

Rating:
Summary: Advising an integrative approach
Review: Beginnings: The Art & Science Of Planning Psychotherapy by Mary Jo Peebles-Kleiger (a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, and board certified clinical hypnosis expert) is a thoughtful and informative guide drawn from the author's years of experience in the outpatient department of the Menninger Psychiatric Clinic. Individual chapters address a wide range of psychotherapy topics, including enhancing the patient's ability to form an alliance, reality testing and reasoning, trial interventions and feedback, and much, much more. Advising an integrative approach and offering its resources as a primer and sourcebook, Beginnings is highly recommended and an invaluable addition to any professional or academic Psychotherapy Studies or Clinical Psychology reference collection.