A Report on Myself: The Science and/or Art of Assessment

Abstract

Disregarding my empirically documented warnings to generations of students, I am ultimately succumbing to my own eisegesis. In this article, I proffer a personal exemplar of low- and high-inference interpretation of significant persons, events, and products during my professional lifetime. These selected bits of data are contained in childhood and educational experiences, three chronological periods, three 1949 Thematic Apperception Test (Murray, 1943) stories, and bits of several poems. These data coalesce in an interpretive statement, analogous to an assessment report but ultimately something more and something less than an optimal report. As an interpretive schema, a hierarchal model of clinical inference illustrates and exemplifies employment of distinct levels to increase the reliability of high-inference interpretation. While inadequately equipped as a psychologist assessor for such self-scrutiny, this narrative may provide a case history exemplar of a process that has relevance for myself, for the Society of Personality Assessment, and for understanding personality within a human science aegis.