Psychological testing and evaluation with abusive parents and abused children are valuable adjuncts in understanding the combination of factors that caused the abuse and the factors involved in remedying the family difficulties. Psychological testing can help determine the parent's degree of dangerousness, the parent's culpability, and the parent's diagnosis and prognosis. A typical test battery involves the projective test, the objective test, the intelligence test, and the assesment of neurological damage. Characteristics of abusive parents, as determined by psychological testing are a poor sense of self, expecting and longing for a constant supply of love, overwhelming feelings of loneliness and abandonment, difficulty modulating strong affect, maladaptive defenses, dependence on others to define a sense of self, and difficulty in suspending one's own needs. Some of the characteristics of abused children are difficulty in tolerating affect or anxiety, poor and distorted self-image or self-esteem, the use of primitive defenses and primary process magical thinking, and lack of a true sense of self. 13-item bibliography.