A Review of Michael Silverstein's “Disorders of the Self: A Personality-Guided Approach”

Michael Silverstein's (2007) Disorders of the Self: A Personality-Guided Approach reintroduces the valuable concept of character or personality and places it in a self psychological context. He argues that descriptive similarities are less effective ways of understanding character disorders than an understanding of the self-pathologies that underlie them. His argument here is conducted in conversation with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed. [DSM–IV]; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1994).

The DSM–IV (APA, 1994) groups personality disorders “into three clusters based on descriptive similarities. Cluster A includes the paranoid, Schizoid and Schizotypal Personality Disorders … Cluster B includes the Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic and Narcissistic Personality Disorders

… Cluster C includes the Avoidant, Dependent, and Obsessive–Compulsive Personality Disorders …” (pp. 629–630). The text then warns that “this clustering system … has serious limitations …” (pp. 629–630).

Michael Silverstein's (2007) thoughtful, comprehensive, scholarly, and deeply humane investigation of personality disorders agrees. Thus, he abandons the notion of categorization by descriptive similarities and recasts the illnesses of Axis II in terms of self-pathology. It is Silverstein's thesis that personality disorder theory has become too narrowly focused on issues of classification and definition and has, in so doing, cut itself off from concern with the affective experience and everyday life struggles of people in the world. Silverstein sees self psychology, with its focus on the cohesiveness of the self, as especially well-suited to restoring a human face to the study of personality disorders.

Silverstein (2007) groups schizoid and schizotypal personality disorders with avoidant personality disorder, seeing all three as effects of mirroring failures that lead to sel