A FREUDIAN CONSTRUCT LOST AND RECLAIMED

Journal of Personality, 1999

The prototype approach was used to assess the presence of personality features associated with borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and psychopathic personality syndromes in a sample of 91 young adults from the Block and Block (1980) longitudinal study. These personality prototypes were found to be related to the use of denial and projection, and especially to the immature manifestations of those defenses, in ways consistent with theory.

Journal of Personality Disorders, 2013

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that personality pathology is, at its core, fundamentally interpersonal. We review the proposed DSM-5 Section 3 redefinition of personality pathology involving self and interpersonal dysfunction, which we regard as a substantial improvement over the DSM-IV (and DSM-5 Section 2) definition. We note similarities between the proposed scheme and contemporary interpersonal theory and interpret the DSM-5 Section 3 definition using the underlying assumptions and evidence base of the interpersonal paradigm in clinical psychology. We describe how grounding the proposed DSM-5 Section 3 definition in interpersonal theory, and in particular a focus on the "interpersonal situation", adds to its theoretical texture, empirical support, and clinical utility. We provide a clinical example that demonstrates the ability of contemporary interpersonal theory to augment the DSM-5 definition of personality pathology. We conclude with directions for further research that could clarify the core of personality pathology, and how interpersonal theory can inform research aimed at enhancing the DSM-5 Section 3 proposal and ultimately justify its migration to DSM-5 Section 2.

Roczniki Psychologiczne, 2017

In this paper we aim to portray the evolution of the understanding, classification and diagnosis of personality disorders. We analyze the characteristics of normal and abnormal personality in the light of the debate about the nature of mental disorders. A brief historical outline of the conceptualization of personality disorders is followed by a description of the evolution of contemporary diagnostic systems. The limitations and problems of these systems are analyzed.

Durability has traditionally been considered to be a defining feature of personality disorders, but recent studies have challenged this notion. We review the most recent findings on the stability and course of personality pathology.

The Oxford Handbook of Personality Disorders, 2012

We present a model of personality psychopathology based on the assumptions; descriptive metastructure; and developmental, motivational, and regulatory processes of the contemporary integrative interpersonal theory of personality. The interpersonal model of personality psychopathology distinguishes between the definition of personality pathology and individual differences in the expression of personality disorder. This approach facilitates interdisciplinary conceptualizations of functioning and treatment by emphasizing the interpersonal situation as a prominent unit of analysis, organized by the metaconstructs of agency and communion and the interpersonal circumplex model. Linking personality psychopathology to agentic and communal constructs, pathoplastic relationships with those constructs, patterns of intraindividual variability, and interpersonal signatures allows personality dysfunction to be tied directly to psychological theory with clear propositions for research and treatmen...

Salud Mental, 2013

Profundizar en los fundamentos teóricos de la propia especialidad es algo necesario para la labor asistencial de cualquier facultativo en Medicina. Ante las ya inminentes nuevas clasificaciones sobre las enfermedades mentales, hacemos un breve repaso de la historia de los trastornos de personalidad y nos planteamos las principales dificultades que se ponen de manifiesto al hacer el diagnóstico de trastorno de personalidad siguiendo los actuales criterios DSM−IV/ CIE−10.

1991

For more than a decade, research studies on the various personality disorders have been carried out at an ever-expanding pace (Blashfield and McElroy, 1987; Gorton and Akhar, 1990). Factors promoting this research have included the establishment within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) of a separate axis for the diagnosis of personality disorders, the enumeration within DSM-III of diagnostic criteria for these conditions, and the development of standardized interviews for the assessment of personality disorders. Innovations such as these are expected to advance the scientific stature of personality disorder research.

2014

This thesis explores the structure of various models of General Personality Disorder (PD) and severity levels of PD. In the first part of this thesis, a model of functional impairment, i.e. Livesley's adaptive failure model, as a definition of General PD, and a model of structural impairment, i.e. Kernberg's model of ego- organisation, as a definition of core features of PD, are investigated. The psychometric properties of the General Assessment of Personality Disorders (GAPD), as an instrument for assessing the core features of PD, and the Inventory of Personality Organization (IPO), as a measure of the structural model of Kernberg are described. Also, in a study using item-response theory (IRT), markers of a general level of personality (dys)functioning are identified. These markers and models of general personality dysfunction are compared with the Alternative DSM-5 model for PD. Part two of this thesis explores the relationships between models of general personality dysf...

Psychiatric Services, 1990

This review oftbe recent literature on personality disorders summarizes theoretical and methodologic issues, DSM-III-R criteria sets, nosological controversies, and current treatment approaches. Work in the personality disorders is burgeoning, with increasing attention to improved reliability and validity of diagnosis. Investigators are looking at such issues as the development of dimensional taxonomies, the effect ofstate vanables, the problem of diagnostic overlap, the effect ofcomorbid conditions on course and treatment, the predictive power of criteria, and external validatons. The DSM-Ill-R criteria sets, despite their polytheticformat, may be no more reliable than their predecessors. Because treatment remains largely unresearched, the dinician must continue to rely on skillful assessment of each patient, with psychoanalytic psychotherapy and symptom-oriented drug trials providing thefoundation of therapy. Since the last review ofrecent developments in the field of personality disorders in this journal, by Widiger and Frances (1) in 1985, the literature in this area has mushroomed.