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This new edition of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual is an important contribution to the literature. It updates psychoanalytic, psychodynamically informed classification of psychopathology, mental disorders, mental functioning, and the functioning of normal individuals as well, combining multiple theoretical and clinical perspectives in an integrated approach to diagnosis. That permits not only placing individual patients into a general category of mental illness, but also categorizing each individual personally as a unique case in which whatever particular syndrome dominates can be seen in the context of that individual's particularities, deficits, capabilities, and resources.
The PDM-2 is the most sophisticated presently available system we have for diagnosing individuals who suffer from mental illness or who have some degree of mental suffering. It overcomes the unreasonable disjunction between categorical and dimensional classifications of personality. We need both categorical and dimensional criteria; efforts either to represent psychopathology as discrete categories without a dimensional perspective or to avoid any categorical distinctions between kinds of personality and psychopathology are a problem of the thinking processes in our profession. The new PDM overcomes what seemed terribly progressive some years ago, the putatively atheoretical classification of the DSM-III and DSM-IV system—a kind of willful self-blinding in the service of a pseudo-objectivity that fortunately is beginning to be eroded in the DSM-5 system. At the same time, I believe it is a much more sophisticated system of description of the earlier syndromes and differential diagnoses than one finds in the DSM system.
Its various dimensions are significant and welcome. First, it foregrounds the general, critically important dimension of severity, centered on the organization of the personality and that level of organization of the mind, so to speak, that permits an overall assessment of the