Research and Scholarly Activities: Assessment

Abstract

F. L. Wells could serve as the prototype of the pre-World War II clinical psychologists whose role was that of expert psychological examiner. He seems to have been the only person who was both certified as a consulting psychologist by APA and later became a diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology. Like S. I. Franz, Wells worked for a time at the McLean Hospital. He was later affiliated with the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and then with the Department of Hygiene of Harvard University. Wells was more of a scholar than a researcher. For example, one of his claims to fame was as an interpreter of psychoanalysis to his psychologist colleagues. He was not a psychoanalyst and was careful to maintain a sense of objectivity and nonpartisanship in the many such articles he wrote, beginning in 1912 (Shaffer, 1964). Wells had spent some time in Germany as a child and was fluent in German, which helped in this interpretive task. Wells’s handbook of informal mental examination procedures (Wells & Ruesch, 1945) was of great value to clinical psychologists and to those who had to learn hurriedly to become clinicians during World War II. He was not a man of narrow interests, either. One of the items on his curriculum vitae was a letter to the editor of Science commenting on the nocturnal habits of spiders (Wells, 1944). (In 1922–1923, Wells was chair of the APA Clinical Section and later served as chair of the APA committee that certified consulting psychologists. He received one of the first Division 12 awards for scientific and professional contributions in 1958.)