Life Course for John

John has had more than 50 years of professional experience in part using evaluation instruments of which the MMPI occupied a time-consuming presence. Fortunately for John, he is now retired from the lists. There is time to look over what has transpired.

John graduated from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1954. His professor Hermann F. Buegel was his role model. He was an honest man filled with contagious energy and enthusiasm. He stuck up for his students, a rare attribute for a full professor. This did not sit well light with administrative types. John interjected, as the analysts are wont to say, at least some of these virtues with the same results from the side of the administrators he has encountered. James Brody taught John neuroanatomy in the Medical School. He even gave John his very own brain to dissect. John graduate in 1954 receiving the Bachelor of Arts with Honors degree.

He entered the New School for Social Research in New York City in the fall of 1954; graduating with the Masters of Arts degree in 1957. There his professors were such luminaries as Kurt Goldstein, Hans Lukas Teuber, Solomon Asch, Mary Henley, Hans Jonas, and Hans Wallach. Gestalt psychology was the theoretical approach for all research.

John's friend Erwin Friedman, Ph.D. painted a glowing picture of the adventures inherent in a European education. John set out in 1960 for Vienna. He arrived there to be greeted by Erwin at a café in the hotel in which he was staying. Erwin was proud of his US citizenship. He showed his US passport to one and all. He ordered 'Weel' (veal, he never got the pronunciation of the American 'W' quite right) and began to familiarized John to the local scene. Enrollment in the psychology program was in September. Graduation occurred in July 1963.

A list of John's professors includes Hubert Roracher who was the leading European authority on physiological psychology.

Viktor Frankl is the creator of Logotherapy; a concept arising out of his 36 months as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. Frankl was an exceptionally generous man who gave time for John to attend a year and a half of his weekly clinical presentations along with two other Americans. Frankl formulated the first ever anti-anxiety medication in the world. He was an accomplished neurosurgeon as well as a psychologist.

Frederick Kainz, an exceptional raconteur, gourmand, wine expert, and linguist (he spoke over 26 languages) as well as philosopher asked John if he could publish a small paper comparing the English evolving in England with that in America that John had written.

Klaus Foppa researched the psychology of learning issues. He relocated to Basel Switzerland to continue his work after John graduated.

Professors Haeckel, Hirschberger, and Slawik taught John the intricies of Ethnology research.

Professors Bayr-Klimpfinger and Asperger taught Pedagogical Psychology.

Professors Frankl, Nowathy, and Solms conducted classes in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

The dissertation topic was the use of a stress measurement technique named Microvibration with mentally retarded children and a group of neurologically normal children. The results demonstrated that the disadvantaged group lived with higher levels of stress on a daily basis.

John served in institutions for the mentally retarded, prisons, jails, juvenile detention facilities, community mental health centers, state hospitals, general hospitals as well as psychiatric hospitals. John has worked in the forensic arena for 30 years. He has presented testimony in civil and criminal trials and presented before a state supreme court.

Some Reasons for Using or Not Using the MMPI. Information Which May Be of Assistance

Piotrowski in 1972 writes, "Much of the popularity of the (MMPI) test can be explained by the psychology of the examiner. He does not have to make any decisions and thus has no responsibility for the results" (p. 80). "Since the test pertains to intimate personal matters and since in many instances the subject can predict what interpretation is likely to be placed on his response, answers to the MMPI (or any questionnaire) are seldom completely frank, either because of conscious fear or unconscious defense against anxiety alleviation, which seems to be a condition of a frank and valid psychological self-evaluation. For this reason, the MMPI is not a dependable aid in neuropsychiatric diagnoses, especially in borderline cases, when a diagnostic aid is most helpful" (p. 80. Emphasis added).

"In about one out of five cases the MMPI significantly exaggerates the psychopathology of an individual, if information from other sources serves as a criterion for judgment. Admissions of difficulties are not necessarily more valid than assertions of well-being" (p. 80-81).

"The assumption of the MMPI is that the accuracy of the subject's self-ratings is not a condition of the test's validity. The authors (Starke R. Hathaway and J. Charnley McKinley) believe that the test rests on what the patient says, not on the truth value of what he says" (81).

"What the patient says and what he thinks he does do not always coincide" (p. 80).

"Statements are made in the first person singular in the belief that his encourages self-identification and self-references. However, this use of the first person instead of the third person is incompatible with the anxiety-alleviating principle" (p. 81). The anxiety-alleviating principle rests upon directing the focus away from a subject's awareness in order to reduce the conscious and unconscious evocation of anxiety. Test items written in the third person allow subjects responding to the test items to focus on the content of the item and not upon how the answer would make them look in the eyes of the individual who will interpret, or have access to, the test results.

"Many mental patients manage to produce normal MMPI profiles; that is, the peaks of all scales are within the middle range of T scores, between 30 to 70. But only 10 to 15 percent of mental patients can deliberately simulate a normal profile. Those who fail in this attempt succeed only in making their MMPI look more abnormal. This shows that the lack of frankness and the pseudo-normality can be a function of unconscious defenses against anxiety as well as a deliberate effort of self-concealment" (p. 82).

"The test gives better results when the subject feels it is his advantage to be frank and to admit weaknesses; it is usually unreliable when he feels it is not to his advantage to be truthful and guileless" (p. 82).

"It may be that the MMPI has reached its highest level of perfection and cannot be improved upon. The paper-and-pencil personality inventories have definite limitations even when they are as sophisticated in structure as the MMPI" (p. 82).S

Piotrowski, Z. A. (1972). Psychological Testing of Intelligence and Personality. In A. M Freedman and H. I. Kaplan (Eds.), Diagnosing Mental Illness. New York, N. Y. Atheneum.

"Test items written in the third person allow subjects responding to the test items to focus on the content of the item and not upon how the answer would make them look in the eyes of the individual who will interpret, or have access to, the test results."

This sentence focuses clearly on the principle error in MMPI methodology. Items which demand a person think of how they appear to others evoke powerfully defensive responding. The responses attempt to make an appearance to others of how the person wishes, need, and want others to see them and respond to them. How different the MMPI results and interpretations would have turned out had this admonition been heeded.

The fracture lines existing between the MMPI grouped data and the data generated from an individual taking the MMPI do not yield interpretative statements that coincide with the reality of the individual's life. The person who interprets the MMPI test results must do a yeoman's task of deleting the errant group data interpretations which do not accurately describe the client and supplying those interpretations which do more or less accurately describe something useful about the individual. The amount of error injected into the interpretation is unknown and most probably will always remain unknown.

Historically paper-and-pencil tests have served as short cuts to obtaining the clinically necessary individual information in order to avoid the tedium of sitting for hours upon hours with individuals, some of whom leave a rather unpleasant cachet. The pressures to get the job done in the time allotted demand using techniques that ignore what is unique to the individual. The MMPI is designed, perhaps not intentionally, to meet these time shrinking requirements.

The methods employed in the MMPI to compare the individual's responses to those amalgamated into group statistics objectify the individual's responses. This objectification ignores the unique features of the individual's opinion of themselves and their response to the situations in which they find themselves.

The Toils of Testing offers MMPI interpretive statements that can be chosen by the interpreter to best fit what is unique to the personality and circumstances of the individual being evaluated. The statement and an additional citation of facts contained in the history and public documentation can be added to bolster the statement's credibility.

The validation of the statements is the task of the professional conducting the assessment.