Methodological Problems with the Classification of Personality Disorders: The Significance of Existential Types

Abstract

The one-sided orientation of the DSM-III-R classification of the personality disorders as real types, promoted by logical empiricism, takes into account only the abnormality and not the special quality of these disorders. This quality consists of inflexibility, a restriction of being-able-to-experience and to-behave, which results in maladaptation and subjective suffering. The author discusses inflexibility as a restriction of freedom, that is, as an existential category not accessible to empirical—statistical science but only to an existential—phenomenological approach. This approach forms the so-called existential types. Melancholic and hysterical personality disorders are characterized as two contrasting existential types of overidentifying and nonidentifying identity formation. Additionally, the author describes manic—depressives as “hypernomic” (nomos = law, rule), that is, as oriented towards an uncritical, undetached fulfillment of given social norms. Not being able to behave deviantly is as dysfun...