Co-Existence Or Alliance? Psychological Assessment and Its Effects on Therapeutic Process Using Systemic Psychotherapy As an Example (Report‪)‬

Psychotherapy and Psychological Assessment Despite the extensive literature on psychological assessment (Kubinger, 2003; Kubinger, 2006) and its application within psychotherapy (Cierpka, 2000, 2003; Fiegl & Reznicek, 2000; Kubinger, 2006; Laireiter, 2000a) there is still great uncertainty among practicing psychotherapists about the use of psychological assessment within their work. In Austria clinicalpsychological assessment forms only a small part, if at all present, of what is taught as part of psychotherapy education (e.g. Training guidelines--Psychoanalysis; Austrian Psychotherapy Act; Training guidelines--Systemic Therapy), resulting in little engagement with this subject for those psychotherapists without additional clinical psychological or psychological training. Psychological assessment is, thematically and in terms of application, closely linked to psychotherapy. Many questions addressed by psychological assessment are also relevant to psychotherapeutic practice and some questions can only be answered with the aid of psychological assessment (Laireiter, 2005). Despite, or perhaps, because of this close and yet vague connection, most therapists have a very clear attitude towards psychological assessment. They have decided to either reject, endorse or simply ignore the option of employing it, while the need is not felt for either the gathering of findings about efficacy based on psychological assessment or for existing findings to be incorporated into therapy (Ludewig, 2005; Stieger, 1995). This attitude is seldom supported by thoroughly researched results or experience tested in practice. Most of these attitudes either stem from personal opinion or life experience, and not from the scrutiny of the particular theoretical concepts of assessment, or are based on a profound lack of information about how to employ psychological assessment. Control studies of the effects of psychological assessment within psychotherapeutic processes, whether fruitful or disruptive in nature, could not be found even in extensive research of literature. Assessment, as an information gathering process, and psychotherapy whether seen as a fruitful partnership or an enforced and not very harmonic relationship, are an "integral element of a circular process" (Scheib & Wirsching, 1994, p. 169). In everyday practice the therapist always encounters psychological assessment anew; patients come to the therapist with diagnoses or results, the therapist creates a hypothesis based on information, evaluates their own work with the help of assessment techniques (Braun & Regli, 2000; Laireiter, 2000b) and even sometimes employs these for therapeutic purposes (especially projective techniques such as the Enchanted Family (Kos & Biermann, 2002), representational tests such as the Family System Test (Gehring, 1998), or circular questioning in the Subjective Family Image (Mattejat, 1994)), for further information about assessment tasks in psychotherapy, see (Laireiter, 2000c). Some assessment techniques even come unmistakably from a therapeutic background (such as Beckmann, Brahler and Richter's Giessen Test (Beckmann, Brahler, & Richter, 1983) psychoanalysis or the Family Board (Ludewig, 2000) systemic family therapy). There are, especially among the main systemic family therapy clientele, namely couples and families (in the widest definition of those words), a large number of techniques which concentrate on this target group and the most common problems that they bring to psychotherapy. These techniques include Couples Diagnosis with the Giessen test (Brahler & Brahler, 1997), the Family Relations Indicator (Howells & Lickorish, 1989), the Family Assessment Measure (Cierpka & Frevert, 1994), the Family System Test (Gehring, 1998) and the Family Identification Test (Remschmidt & Mattejat, 1999) (see also Ludewig, 2000; Brahler & Brahler, 1997; Benninghoven, Cierpka and Thomas, 2003; Thomas, 2003). Despite this wide r