| Abstract: | Since "the degree of abnormality of any patient is always ultimately measured with reference to some observer" the community person is proposed as a composite observer. The clinical worker's main job is the assessment of the patient's achievement of relatively stable reference points and the evaluation of the patient's achievement of personal and social realities. An experiment is described which indicates that psychiatrists practicing in a common institutional setting show a higher agreement about the social world among themselves than any of the psychiatrists show with their patients. The implications of considering the concept of adjustment as achievement are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
