three major personality groupings. In fact, one of the major points of the article is that the therapist should endeavor to balance the therapy into an orientation that takes into account several aspects of the TFA personality, combines them, and synthesizes them into something unique and usable.
The article is weak in that it spends little time on its focal message of the implementation of theory into practice. One is left wondering whether the TFA personality is readily apparent, or if a particular type of test is necessary to clearly identify the different types.
However, Hutchins' thesis is that the client therapist relationship can be improved by utilizing some of the techniques he alludes to in the article. In this, he would appear to have been somewhat successful. Perhaps this article would be the first step in a series of research oriented problems to the TFA approach, and would certainly be strengthened by the use of the two previous articles by Hutchins.
The article by Darrell Smith presents previous surveys of the attitudes and orientations of psychologists. Smith believes that these attitudes were important in that they provided a great deal of disseminated information to the profession, but that much of the information was biased toward clinical psychologists. In this bias, counseling psychologists are often ignored, a fact that Smith believes is unfortunate. Using a series of questionnaires, Smith statistically analyzed the trends in the literature and presented results that indicated some changes were evident in the profession.
One major flaw in the study was that just as Smith chastises other professionals for over generalizing certain behaviors and attitudes, he tends to place "schools of thought" into similar categorizations. In this, one sees strict boundaries that are quite unlikely in the actual profession.
However, the trends identified by Smith do serve as a valuable assessment tool in th