The Psychological Assessment of Abused and Traumatized Children

The past decade has seen more and more clinicians involved in the assessment and treatment of abused and traumatized children. They have contributed to an impressively large body of literature on the impact of abuse and trauma at all ages, the focus of which has been the short and long-term sequelae apparent in the child’s behavior, emotional experience, and social interaction. But there have been few efforts to investigate the ways in which abuse and trauma damage the intrapsychic systems and structures that often guide, direct, and inform the child’s manifest adjustment and functioning. The need to redress the balance was the major impetus for this book. Kelly offers a clinical paradigm for the personality assessment of abused or traumatized children via projective instruments–the TAT and Rorschach–and shows how various projective measures and indices can be utilized as sensitive barometers of changes in self, object, and ego functioning following therapeutic interventions and other corrective experiences. But further, integrating the tenets of trauma theory and those of psychoanalytic theory, he sets this clinical paradigm in a meaningful theoretical context, and draws on both theory and clinical experience to develop a comprehensive psychological composite of the child who has been maltreated. Part I provides an overview of theoretical models relevant to the assessment and diagnosis of the maltreated child. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory serves as one frame and is discussed first, with particular emphasis on object relations and ego functions. Equal attention is devoted to developmental psychology as another frame. Part II reviews relevant research. The Mutality of Autonomy Scale (MOA) and the Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale (SCORS) are introduced as examples of reliable and valid instruments readily employed to assess the impact of abuse or trauma on a child’s object relations functioning. Additional Rorschach ind