Reflections on the Personality and Psychopathology Interface in Honor of Scott O. Lilienfeld: Toward Illuminating the Nature of the Processes Underlying Personality Disturbances

Abstract

Scott O. Lilienfeld maintained an intense and probing interest in the interface of personality and psychopathology. He was especially intrigued by the personality systems subserving the clinical construct/disorder of psychopathy. Each of us knew Lilienfeld at various junctures in his academic career, and here we celebrate his scientific interest in this substantive area of clinical psychological science. We share our intellectual and theoretical forays in the challenging terrain of the personality–psychopathology interface through brief overviews of our respective contributions and models on this topic. We share our perspectives, which at times are overlapping and at times divergent, with reference to the corpus of published work that each of us has produced through our respective research programs. We invite the reader to sample our different perspectives, to engage with this fascinating area, and, in doing so, to implicitly embrace Lilienfeld’s scientific passion for this developing area of personality and psychopathology science.