Toward a New Personology

Having weathered the storm of polemic and willful neglect from both the professional and academic communities, personology is experiencing a second flowering. Considering any personality theory as unscientific and archaic, proponents of the empirical and positivist schools that predominated in the sixties and seventies chose to dismiss a century of analytic trailblazing by such as Freud, Jung, Horney, Sullivan, et al., and concentrated instead on objectively real traits, S-R bonds, or statistical factors. Now, with the advent of the American Psychiatric Association’ s most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R), personality disorders are once again deemed fundamental to an understanding of other psychopathologies. And nowhere has personology experienced a more full and viable recrudescence than in the work of Theodore Millon, author of Disorders of Personality and contributor to DSM-III and the forthcoming DSM-IV. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Millon explicates his new theory of personality, its foundations and applications to the study of psychopathology. He draws on the principles inherent in the physical and biological sciences to fashion a model based, in great part, in modern evolutionary theory. This innovative conceptual structure sees personality in terms of its basic survival and adaptive functions— especially in the polarities of pleasure/pain, passivity/activity and self/other. After developing the foundations of his conceptual model, Millon shows how it undergirds much of psychology in general, as well as psychopathologic theory, classification, assessment, and intervention. Rooted in natural scientific principles andexhibiting all the intellectual rigor typical of its illustrious antecedents, this groundbreaking work is destined to be seminal in informing the next generation of mental health clinicians, researchers, and theorists. An essential tool for psychologists, psychiatrists a