My Life in Testing

Abstract

This autobiographical essay describes my career as a psychodiagnostician, which began at the City College of New York in 1941 and ended in the late 1970s when I became a full-time psychoanalyst in Manhattan. As a green, 20-year-old psychology undergraduate, I was picked by Gardner Murphy to assist David Rapaport at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, who was developing new methods for using psychological tests to diagnose and treat soldiers during World War II. Our findings were presented in the classic, two volume work, Diagnostic Psychological Testing, published in 1945–1946 (Rapaport, Gill, & Schafer, 1945–1946; 1968), to which I added two clinically enriched monographs: The Clinical Application of Psychological Tests, published in 1948 (Schafer, 1948/1995), and Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing (Schafer, 1954), published in 1954. After the Menninger Clinic, I continued to hone my assessment expertise at the Austen Riggs Center and Yale University, but I also sought opportunities to develop psychotherapy skills. I completed psychoanalytic training in 1960 at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and thereafter sought positions that would offer more time for treating patients. A notable highpoint in my testing career was assessing Jack Ruby, killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. I look back fondly at my years as an assessment psychologist, which produced nearly 4 decades of great memories.