Personality: Psychodynamic Perspectives

THE PERSONALITY disorder literature bulges with arguments concerning the aptness of the dimensional or the categorical view as a basis for classification.¹ Now Horowitz and his team² ask yet another question that goes beyond the issue of discriminant validity in personality taxonomy, raising the issue of the usefulness of our current classification for intervention. Other matters are also considered in their criticism, such as the idea that static personality profiles do not account for the multiple reaction patterns that may arise in any one person with a so-called personality disorder. They reintroduce the role-relationship model (RRM), about which Horowitz³ has written so eloquently before, and acknowledge his debt to the core conflictual relationship theme (CCRT) of Luborsky et al.⁴ This report is not a fully original contribution, but rather a summary of new and prior reliability and validity studies that recommend the scientific claim of the