My second husband wanted to retire, sell everything and take five years to circumscribe the world.  I was an analyst of a weird psychological test.  I could go with him because the tests came to me in the mail.  I analyzed them and sent back in the mail.  I was paid handsomely for every analysis.

 

I had to get up early in the morning and then do the work of deciphering the intent of the person filling out the test.  It usually took me half an hour to complete it.  But I couldn’t do another one that day or I would lose my ability to see the standpoint of the person who filled out the test.

 

My work required me to analyze psychological tests from people I never saw or heard of.  I never knew whether the test came from:  a typical university student, a professor, or a juvenile delinquent about to be committed to a psychiatric ward or an adult involved in a criminal court trial or an adult involved in a child custody case or a gifted child or an accomplished adult or a full blown schizophrenic or a psychopathic.   This test had been devised scientifically to reveal the fundamental attitudes of the test taker.  (PREDICTION OF VIOLENCE: Attitudes as Projected in Sentence completion) Probably my most dramatic analysis is recorded in a most unusual book (BAD BOYS, BAD MEN: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder)  Here is quote from  it:

 

“A late colleague, psychiatrist Richard Jenkins, was fascinated with my study of antisocials, Gacy in particular.  He told me that in 1984 he had asked Eve Gowdey, another former colleague, to interpret Gacy’s 1968 Sentence Completion Test—with Gacy’s name removed, of course.  The test – a list of 40 sentence fragments that the patient is asked to complete—is intended to provide clues to the patient’s inner thoughts, much like the Rorschach ink blots.  Gowdey’s reading produced a far more chilling assessment then any found in Gacy’s file.  ‘The most striking impression,’ she wrote, ‘is the feeling that man is sorry he was caught.’ “She went on to suspect that he was ‘physically and grossly aggressive to anyone he considered in his power, [and that] any change in his behavior would originate only by chance and then from something outside of himself.’  She stated that she would ‘never trust this man or expect any improvement in his behavior.  I would assume [that he was] physically dangerous to any one he thought was powerless.’  By then, of course, Gacy was on death row.”