Clinician\'s guide to neuropsychological assessment

Book Reviews

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the early bylaws and mandates of psychology's associations, and throughout this book weaves in information about critical individuals in psychology's history and the key themes in the development of clinical psychology. The book is divided into three main sections. The first of these is a chronological documentation of the major associations or groups involved in clinical psychology's development from 1896 to the present. The clear fulcrum association for this discussion is the American Psychological Association and its various Divisions and Sections. Although other associations relevant to clinical psychology are mentioned, their involvement in the development of clinical psychology is clearly given less attention than that of the APA and its components. This section of the book is an engrossing review of key people, and both individual and organizational dynamics that shaped the current structures of American clinical psychology. It is also in these 14 chapters related to the organizational aspects of the history of clinical psychology that the author's ideas are most clearly developed. The second part of the volume discusses "Issues and Personalities". Various issues such as the roles of basic science, assessment and intervention in clinical psychology, models of training, credentialling and the economic aspects of psychology are all addressed. These 8 chapters (spread over 60 pages) are short and pithy, and many important issues only get passing comment (e.g. behavioral assessment is mentioned in only 9 lines, APA's special assessment for practitioners that created the highly influential Committee for the Advancement of Professional Psychology receives only 4 lines). Readers interested in these themes may find the book lacking, as other histories of clinical psychology (e.g. Reisman, 1991; Walker, 1991) provide more thorough thematic analyses of these issues. The third major section of the book is its appendices. Fully 86 pages, or approximately one-third of this volume consists of associations' bylaws, and lists of officers and award recipients of associations. This listing is a "Whos's who" of American clinical psychology if ever there was one, and makings for fascinating speculation about the roles of various people in the identified organizations. In summary, this book's strengths are its focus on the organizational structures and their interplay in the history of American clinical psychology. The luminaries of the profession emerge through the organizations, and the various attempts to structure clinical psychology to best fulfil its dual mandates of science and practice make for good reading. This is a text that should be read by beginning clinical psychologists to ground them in their organizational forebears. It is also a useful resource of the key people in clinical psychology's history, and will serve as a benchmark volume for this value alone. K. DOBSON

R. D. VANDERPLOOG (Ed.): Clinician's Guide to Neuropsychological Assessment. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hilsdale, NJ (1994). vii + 307 pp. £53.95. This volume represents a further addition to the enormous body of literature on this subject now available to the clinical neuropsychologist. Because all such books are written with some forms of neuropsychological assessment more in mind than others it is difficult to objectively quantify the contribution that this book makes over its myriad competitors. The book opens with a good contribution from the editor on the important process of data collection in neuropsychological assessment. His contribution provides a practical but comprehensive overview of the important issues for this part of the neuropsychological assessment process. It is also one of the few contributions to neuropsychological assessment literature that includes a discussion of the importance of including behavioural and mood factors in addition to neuropsychological tests in neuropsychological assessment. The book then moves logically on through the thorny issue of determining a patient's premorbid abilities for reasons of comparison with current neuropsychological test data to good contributions on the interpretation of neuropsychological assessment findings and their application to the patient's everyday life. These chapters are well presented and once again practically orientated. There then follows a specialised contribution on the neuropsychological assessment of children which is well written but a little incongruous in a book that has primarily discussed the neuropsychological assessment of adults. However, that child clinical neuropsychology is a separate subject that requires separate treatment is an opinion rather than a criticism, and its inclusion in this volume is not a serious problem. The book ends with contributions on theoretical issues in the field which seem out of place in this applied neuropsychology book. There is perhaps some argument for a discussion of whether fixed or flexible neuropsychological batteries should be used to be included in the volume but I found the contributions on these issues dense and wordy. I was unsure what they added to the usefulness of the book to the clinical neuropsychologist. This is a generally good book on neuropsychological assessment but its promise as a classic text in applied neuropsychology is somewhat diminished by attempts to cover too wide an area in one volume. A further difficulty is that the book discusses some neuropsychological tests in detail (for example, the Halstead Reitan Battery) that, although in common use in the United States, are rarely used by British clinical neuropsychologists. Some of the contributions that the book contains are certainly useful to the student and practitioner of clinical neuropsychology but its price and variation is the relevance and quality of contributions reduces its value as a landmark text in the area. STEPHEN DAVIES