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13 - A Dual-Aspect Approach to Personality Disorder

Locating the Normal in the Abnormal

from Part III - Novel Conceptual Approaches to Personality Disorder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2025

By
Huw Green
Edited by
Konrad Banicki  and
Peter Zachar
Konrad Banicki
Affiliation:
Jagiellonian University, Krakow
Peter Zachar
Affiliation:
Auburn University, Montgomery
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Summary

Personality disorders are classically understood as treatable maladaptive phenotypes that result from biological and psycho-historical facts about people. Some writers and campaigners dissent from this view and offer a more relational/political perspective: we should think not in terms of disordered personalities, but in terms of emotional responses to early life events that are more or less empathically understood in context. In this chapter, I briefly outline these two frames on personality disorder and set them up as a dialectic. I suggest that there is a way of synthesizing the two approaches to arrive at a dual-aspect approach to personality disorders. Personality is the result of biological and psychological facts about people, but it is also a relationally mediated phenomenon. Only by appreciating both of these aspects of personality can we develop a full understanding of what personality disorders are.

Keywords

relationaldual aspectpsychotherapyacute care

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
Conceptualizing Personality Disorder
Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychological Science, and Psychiatry
 , pp. 234 - 243
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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