Reply To J. Beebe's Comment

I AM very pleased to have detailed comments on my paper, and the opportunity to respond to them at the time of publication. However, I am not certain if John Beebe's comments solely address what I wrote. In important respects he seems to be taking ‘to task’ the stated sources, rather than my article, wishing to promote his own revisions of Jung's typology. He also reads intentions into my paper which are clearly not there.

The data for my article come from Jung's Psychological Types, DSN-III and Theodore Millon's book Disorders of Personality (see reference section of my article). In comparing these sources, I found many surprising congruities and an overall focus on longstanding behaviour traits. A comparison between Jung's types with Millon's descriptions of eight of the personality disorders in DSM-III also yielded striking similarities of organisation.

These findings do not mean that certain types are identical with certain personality disorders. However, to the extent that the particular pathological aspects of a type are present, that is, longstanding traits of a maladaptive character, I believe that they also point towards the diagnosis of a personality disorder.

I had thought that this was clearly stated in my article. I was not attempting to do a ‘character analysis’ or explore ‘character neurosis’. Aside from being rather outdated terms, these explorations have already been carried out within the Freudian community and are now, at least partially, included in Axis II of DSM-III.

As for John Beebe's revisions of Jung's typology, I find them too much of a theoretical overload, with too many inferences of given dynamics and phantasy contents. I would advocate clearer distinctions between research and psychopathology on the one hand, and analytic technique and interpretation on the other, the former being based on overt, observable behaviour, while the latter address therapeutic issues and questions of analytic attitude.

From the point of view of diagnosis, persona