Forthright criticism that promoters of tests as well as those who rely on them will find impossible to ignore.
A well-documented and highly readable critique of personality tests, examining their development, flaws, and applications.
Paul, Mind/Body columnist for Shape and a former senior editor of Psychology Today, maintains that personality tests “cannot begin to capture the complex human beings we are.” She looks at how and why various personality test were created and by whom, beginning with the Rorschach inkblot test and including such widely used instruments as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and the NEO-Personality Inventory. These tests, she asserts, cannot predict human behavior, tend to focus on dysfunction (as opposed to health), and often fail to meet scientific standards of validity and reliability. For example, the author cites one study of the Myers-Briggs that found that more than half of those answering the questionnaire were given a different personality type when they took the same test a short while later. Paul warns that the newest approaches to personality assessment involve biological markers, genetic analysis, and computer technology—tools of science that may be so impressive that we accept their pronouncements without question, forgetting that in another century phrenology was thought to offer a scientific approach to the mind. Originally developed to detect mental illness, personality tests are today a favorite instrument of personnel departments of corporations and government agencies needing to hire, sort, and manage people, and they are widely used by school systems to evaluate children and in courts as evidence in both criminal and civil cases. Consequently, says Paul, crucial decisions about people’s lives are being made on the basis of seriously flawed information. She cites other assessment techniques—structured interviews, behavioral observations, a life-story approach—as alternatives, and recommends the institution of various safeguards and limitations on the use of such testing.
Forthright criticism that promoters of tests as well as those who rely on them will find impossible to ignore.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4356-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A wide-ranging, profound study of how the primal human dialogue between parent and child continues after the death of one partner through various adaptive strategies by the survivor. Psychologist Kaplan (Female Perversions, 1990) observes that ``however old or young a person is when a parent dies, an effort is always made to resume the dialogue that was interrupted and to make it right.'' Such is the case even when a parent is emotionally abusive (sometimes leading the inner dialogue to become distorted into psychosis), a victim of massive trauma (e.g., some Holocaust survivors), or ``psychologically dead'' as a result of deep depression. Among the many illustrative case studies Kaplan explores are those of Freud's famous patient Daniel Paul Schreber and of Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert (Gustave's mother), whose melancholia following multiple losses affected her son's disposition, creativity, and ability to achieve independence. With equal acuity, Kaplan examines parents' attempts at continuing a dialogue with children who have died, noting that, if the death of a parent represents the loss of the past, that of a child often seems more disorienting and devastating, for it signifies the unnatural loss of the future. While most of Kaplan's book deals with what psychotherapists refer to as the ``introjection'' of a parent or other significant figure, a kind of unconscious grafting of parts of his or her perceived traits, she also devotes two chapters to parents who maintained dialogues with children murdered by terrorists through political activism, or what might be called ``social externalization.'' Kaplan is very adept at elucidating underlying emotional dynamics in both case studies and in literary or artistic works; her fascinating penultimate chapter is on the surrealist painter RenÇ Magritte. Occasionally bogged down in overanalysis, but generally a probing, sensitive, and finely crafted work that deserves a wide readership among clinicians and laypeople.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-79868-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
It is strange to find small joys in a book about depression, but there are many in Manning's tale of her descent into hell. Among a spate of recent memoirs about depression, what defines Manning's first book is her own experience as a psychotherapist: She highlights the strange and humiliating duality of being able to heal others but not herself. Yet Manning's narrative is never clinical; the writing is simple and moving and laced with a sly, self-deprecating wit (she describes herself as a ``professional voyeur''). Depression creeps up on Manning little by little, disguised as laziness and sloth, and blindsides her, throwing her overcommitted life (as therapist, teacher, wife and mother, church- choir member) into disarry; finally, thoughts of suicide become inescapable. A sympathetic therapist of her own, an empathetic psychiatrist, and a silver tray full of antidepressants (her daughter, Keara, cleans out the medicine chest before a party) fail to end ``the slow erosion of the self, as insidious as any cancer. And, like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience. A room in hell with only your name on the door.'' She finally successfully undergoes electroconvulsive therapy, disturbed to find herself on a psychiatric ward with a crazy young woman she had spied in a restaurant a while back. Manning's road back to health is as long and tortuous as the path that led away from it, requiring reconciliation with both herself and God, who she believed had abandoned her. Despite its focus on herself, Manning's narrative is never claustrophobic; it is full of vibrantly depicted family and friends who bring love and strife: a depressed grandmother, an alcoholic sister, a psychotherapist husband who cannot bear his wife's pain, and independent, spirited Keara (``Mints? Nuts? Antidepressants?'' she asks, holding out her tray of drugs). Admirably honest, beautifully written.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-251183-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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