Massa Carrara, Italy
Tuesday, June 26 - Saturday, June 30, 2018

Objectives

At the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• discuss the concepts of self-verification and disintegration anxiety and how they apply to psychological assessment
• assist clients in forming questions during the initial sessions of a psychological assessment
• conduct an extended inquiry following a standardized administration of various psychological tests
• plan and conduct an assessment intervention session
• plan and conduct a summary/discussion session
• describe client-friendly forms of written assessment feedback
• conduct an assessment follow-up session

Prerequisite training

This workshop is open to mental health professionals and advanced graduate students. Participants should have previous basic training in psychological testing and will be provided with readings prior to the workshop to help them prepare. Professionals with previous training and experience in Therapeutic Assessment are also encouraged to attend, as the most current information and techniques will be presented in this training.

The lead presenter

Stephen E. Finn, Ph.D., President of the Therapeutic Assessment Institute, is a licensed psychologist in Austin, Texas (USA) and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the Director of Training at the European Center for TA at Catholic University of Milan, Italy and of the Asian-Pacific Center for TA in Tokyo, Japan. Dr. Finn is the author of many articles, chapters, and several books on Therapeutic Assessment, psychodiagnosis, and other topics in clinical psychology. In 2011 Dr. Finn was the awarded the Bruno Klopfer Award from the Society for Personality Assessment for distinguished lifetime contributions to personality assessment, and in 2017 he received the award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Assessment Psychology from Section IX of the Society for Clinical Psychology (Division 12 of the American Psychological Association). Also, Dr. Finn is the announced recipient of the 2018 Carl Rogers Award for outstanding contribution to the theory and practice of humanistic psychology from the Society for Humanistic Psychology (Division 32 of the American Psychological Association).

Therapeutic assessment

Therapeutic Assessment is a semi-structured form of collaborative psychological assessment developed by Stephen Finn and his colleagues at the Center for Therapeutic Assessment in Austin, Texas. Therapeutic Assessment can be used for many of the same purposes as traditional psychological assessment: diagnostic clarification, treatment planning, and treatment evaluation. How­ever, in addition, research has shown that Therapeutic Assessment can be a powerful therapeutic intervention for clients and their families, reducing symptomatology, increasing self-esteem and self-compassion, and promoting positive relationships between family members. Therapeutic Assessment also can enhance subsequent clinical interventions, increasing therapeutic alliance and compliance with treatment recommendations. A recent independent meta-analysis of this research concluded: "Clinicians should ... seek out continuing­ education training related to these models [of therapeutic and collaborative assessment]. Those who engage in assessment and testing as usual may miss out, it seems, on a golden opportunity to effect client change and enhance clinically important treatment processes. Similarly, applied training programs in clinical, counseling, and school psychology should incorporate therapeutic models of assessment into their curricula, foundational didactic classes, and practice" (Poston & Hanson, 2010, p. 210).

[Italian]