Przeszłość, teraźniejszość i przyszłość rozwoju formułowania opinii psychologicznej (rozważania teoretyczne i metodologiczne)
Temporal perspective in the process of preparing psychological diagnosis for legal practice

Summary/Abstract: Psychological reports for law are usually based on psychological theories or some (very often unconscious) assumptions influenced by them. Unfortunately, this process can yield untruthful answers. It is especially vivid for theories of personality traits or theories that model social relations. It is interesting to realize what conclusions can be drawn if we take the time as a variable. This paper tries to show that some theories formulate their expectations about “past”, some about “presence” and few about “future”. However, questions asked in the court usually concern offender’s behavior (eye witness, the future of a child, psychic state of an author of the last will, etc.) in the past or in the future (e.g. child welfare, results of psychotherapy or readjustment, and so on.). Psychologists can study a person subjected to such questioning at some point in the time. In this way the psychologist can only make assumptions using models (e.g. theories) delivered by his special knowledge. Such process of reasoning is greatly influenced by the initial point of departure. In this paper the author tries to show some phenomena make the process of inference especially difficult.

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