Toward a cultural history of the personality disorders

Abstract

Psychiatric categories in general, and the personality disorders in particular, remain problematic and contested. This is no where more clearly evident than in the case of the ‘antisocial’ and ‘histrionic’ personality disorders. In part, the problem is related to the observation of differences in gender distribution. Men are more likely to be diagnosed ‘antisocial’ than women, and women are more likely to be diagnosed ‘histrionic’ than men. Confusion results partly from the suspicion that these categories may be culturally conditioned and therefore spurious as medical labels true in some ‘absolute’ sense. This paper argues that the antisocial and histrionic disorders have cultural histories, representing (in extreme form) values strongly congruent with familiar cultural stereotypes: the ‘independent’ male and the ‘dependent’ female. The process by which these values were delegated to men and women is examined, and then shown to be at least partly determinative of later developments in the formation of psychiatric categories.