Personality and Psychopathology,

This handsome collection of papers represents the proceedings of the March 1993 meeting of the American Psychopathological Association, which focused on the issue of personality and psychopathology. The chapters that constitute this volume offer an impressive window on the research and theoretical discussions that were active in this area of inquiry during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and, as such, this work provides a useful punctuation mark for what has been termed the “first phase” of personality disorders research (1).

The first phase of research in the personality disorders had as its focus matters related to the basic description of the personality disorders, the assessment of personality disorders, and the development of preliminary notions linking personality disorders to the realm of normal personality. The first phase of research necessarily hinted at future directions that were to be pursued in the coming decade, and the papers Dr. Cloninger has assembled provided an exciting glimpse of things to come. In short, the papers in this volume provide excellent summaries of the early personality disorder research efforts after the introduction of explicit diagnostic criteria for axis II disorders in DSM-III and, later, DSM-III-R. In a way, they represent where the field was just before embarking on what has been termed the “second phase” of personality disorders research (1), one that has come to focus more on issues related to etiology, pathogenesis, sophisticated models of the relationship between personality and personality disorder, and careful longitudinal study of the personality disorders using appropriate methodological designs refined previously by life-span methodologists.

Personality and Psychopathology contains a number of papers that the scholar of personality disorders will find especially useful. For example, Waller’s paper, “Evaluating the Structure of Personality,” is a true gem that details the careful substantive and psychometric issues that have been dealt with in his work (in collaboration with Professor Auke Tellegen) on the seven basic factors underlying personality. This chapter is particularly illuminating with respect to a critical evaluation of the popular lexical description of personality embodied in the so-called five-factor solution. Loranger’s chapter usefully details the development and initial validation of the International Personality Disorder Examination (2) and, as such, represents an excellent summary of this important assessment development, particularly given that it is now widely recognized and enjoying considerable research and clinical use. Eaves and colleagues provide a useful tutorial on the application of modern quantitative genetics analytic strategies to family data, and their chapter suggests the exciting developments to come later in the 1990s, especially with the emergence of quantitative trait loci approaches to genetic influences on individual differences.

At this time, personality disorders research has indeed moved in the directions hinted at in the papers in this volume. For example, there are now two major longitudinal studies under way that seek to articulate the natural course and longitudinal trajectory of personality pathology clearly over time—my Longitudinal Study of Personality Disorders begun in 1990 and the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study begun in 1996 by J.G. Gunderson and colleagues. Moreover, integrations of the neurobiological literature with both personality and personality disorder constructs are beginning to emerge that seek to characterize the complex interactive nature of neurobehavioral systems underpinning these two phenotypic domains in an effort to move this area of modeling ahead (3; unpublished work of Depue and Lenzenweger).

I recommend this volume for its powerful historical value and its unique position in demarcating the transition point between the first and second phases of empirical research and theory development in the personality disorders.