Review: Clinical interview of the Child 2nd edition

Ideally I would be reviewing 'Adlarian Family Counseling 3rd edition' and 'Clinical Interview of the Child' today. Sadly I'm half way through the former and 20 pages away from completing the later. Educational Media is still Visual Media, and while entertainment isn't all sweetness and light it isn't exactly ancient aliens either. Fear not, I have no intentions of going down the rabbit hole with puppets and dementia; even if I do believe everything is better with muppets. For those who don't know, Visual Media is a generalist degree that includes games, storytelling, community based learning, and seductive reasoning. You spend a good portion of it being assigned videos to watch, are at times expected to play video games, and go forth and interview (no seriously, I actually went to Game Stop twice for the sole purpose of interviewing or discussing violence in video games). You are also expected at times to read selections from three textbooks and watch lectures before you come into class and discuss reading, writing, speaking, and thinking about media.

Furthermore, my electives consisted of journalism, oral history, and every communication course that my school offered. I even took an introductory class in speech language pathology when the school dropped one of the minor programs I was attempting due to budget cuts. I didn't take Journalism as an elective because I was seeking any great truth, nor did I take oral history because I care who went forth and conquered what. Nope, being an idealist I probably wanted to expose injustice (because who am I to change anything on my own) and, because anthropology is the study of those who have been conquered in relation to history, documentary filmmaking seems tangentially related to oral history. Besides, I figured you can never really go wrong with learning or reenforcing the ethical procedures and protocols for news gathering and information.

I'm not saying I wanted to be a foreign correspondent or great sportsman like Earnest Hemingway or that I expected to go galavanting on a world tour and write for Sesame Street like Mo Williams. But, I did expect to learn more relevant interviewing and questioning strategies... which I eventually managed to pick up anyway in the years following my graduation, because I kept looking. If I ever do go back to college to get my masters degree it will most definitely be in journalism with a minor in serious games. But, First, I'm going to get a second Bachelor's degree like most working class people. Not that a Bachelor of Science in Speech Language Pathology would be respected any better than a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Media, but at the very least I could be an English teacher while I'm treated like a fool. I suppose after reading 'Clinical interview of the Child' one could be worse off than having an incomplete personality and neurotic functioning.

Unlike Richard Gardener, who likes to structure his interviews and games, Stanley Greenspan takes a different approach entirely. Obviously, there is some structure towards the end of a session, but Greenspan believes that a more natural observation of the child in a structured setting yields a more genuine assessment of the child's level of functioning in several areas. The book has seven chapters Which I assume means it is intended to be read in seven days, or that it was written in that time. Dr. Phil's books are particularly notorious for this, and I often find them in the dollar store. Although, I cannot see someone writing sixty pages nonstop in a single sitting anymore than I would expect anyone to read for more than four hours without blinking. I do like how Greenspan relates a child's level of psychosocial development as being performed on a stage. And, Greenspan's descriptions of things like reality testing, age appropriate behavior, and assertiveness , kind of makes me wonder why he constantly uses the word affect for practically every instance of motivation, desire, emotion, or impact (as versatile as the word is I prefer more varied schema). All the same, if he had written a book describing levels of human intimacy or empathy I would not be surprised.

I will mention the book does trigger some anxiety, I have no relation to the author, his wife, nor any of the children or parents discussed in the book, and found myself angry or irritable at points while I was reading. Granted, it could be related to re-experiencing past trauma, the desire for some revenge or vindication, or just impatience with wanting to understand a particular paragraph so I could move on to the next one if only to get the chapter over with. With roughly twenty pages left in the book I'm fairly certain I will have the book completed in the next twenty-four hours. Chapters two, six, and seven go over observational categories that one should keep in mind while making an assessment. And, chapter three is nothing more than his own take on human development within the categories he outlined. I'll be honest when I say I'm more likely to use psycho-geometrics or hypocrites five (four?) personality model than anything cooked up by Freud or Erikson's stages of human development. Which is probably why I like the 'Adlerian Family Counseling 3rd edition' so much better than any other system or dynamic theory books. The less psychological baggage attached to an assessment tool the better. I like transactional analysis as well, and I'll admit that I pretty much enjoy any form of relationship psychology that could be understood by a child or adolescent really.