Customer Reviews

Disorders of Personality: DSM-IV and Beyond, 2nd Edition

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There are few books in psychology that are as comprehensive in scope and detail as Dr. Millon's book. The book provides a solid, integrative theory of personality and personality disorders that can be used not only in research, but also clinical practice by psychologists from any theoretical orientation. Because it is so comprehensive, the book is especially useful for students. The first section of the book (approximately 200 pgs.) is dedicated to laying down a foundation for the study of personality disorders -- the issues that it entails and a concise (yet, detailed) review of various personality theories. Dr. Millon then presents a rational, integrated theory of personality that is the foundation of his integrated biopsychosocial approach to personality. The rest of the book is dedicated to a detailed examination of the DSM-IV personality disorders. This single book can serve as a primary text for any advanced course in personality. Whether one aggrees with Dr. Millon's theory (and few can disagree with it completely once they understand it's comprehensive and integrated nature), this book is one that anybody who deals with the personality disorders MUST have on their bookshelf.

The book is great, and a "must have" for those who seek a better understanding of personality and its disorders.
The authors not only provide the reader with the know-how, but also an enthralling overview of the history of each personality disorder. By going back to some of the old case studies, the authors did allow me to notice how personality disorders have evolved in the centuries. However, I have also learned that many of the signs of each cluster of PPDD were already described in ancient history.
Apart these cultural connotations, the book is a very helpful hint for those working with patients suffering from obstinate
and "hard-to-treat" personality disorders.
Great book, worth each penny paid.

I have had to buy this book several times--each time paying an enormous amount, it seems. People borrow it and don't return it, they take it off my bookshelf, become absorbed, just want a brief look at it, or, on shared bookshelf declare that my copy is actually theirs. So, I have spent much money on this book. But it is worth it. Reading Millon is discovering a new way to understand people--a sort of typology that incorporates, but is far more complex, that the human personality or character typologies that are invented time to time in historhy. That he has managed to create this complex system of personality typologies, as well as, even more impressively, a series of tests that measure them so accurately and with such psychometrically robust tools gives him, in my view, a stature of those greats we read about in grad school--the Skinners, Guthries, Freuds, Hulls, Tolman's Rogers, Piagets, who in their day formulated broad, at times even paradigm changing theories that they pursued, developed, researched, and elaborated on over the course of a lifetime. Being a psychologist, Millon might not get the recognition he might if his talent at human observation were in another field, since psychology still has a questionable reputation as a science, catching all the aspersions given a social science. As a novelist or film maker, Millon's perceptiveness might be more commonly celebrated. This is a very smart book--a systematic yet highly sensitive roadmap of human nature. Damon LaBarbera, Ph.D.

. . . is another man's path to riches, professional prestige, and social control.

If you want to know about the latest fads and superstitions in America's favorite quackery, then this is a great source. You'll miss out on a few things, such as how psychiatrists had epileptics imprisoned in "colonies" just a few decades ago. Epilepsy was, we were informed by Harvard psychiatrists, proof of pathological criminality. You will also not read about how homosexuals, after long being persecuted by psychiatrists (electroconvulsive therapy, insulin schock, lobotomy, etc.) were suddenly declared well, and about how people who dislike homosexuals then were afflicted with a "mental illness" called "homophobia." You won't learn how it is that psychiatrists "knew" that people contracted peptic ulcers because they could't handle stress until the bacteria was isolated that actually causes such ulcers. You won't learn this because psychiatrists don't like to get hemmed in by history, or science, or ethical considerations. The authors discretely ignore the fact that no autopsy has ever revealed a person to have had "schizophrenia" or that any disease revealed to have a genuine organic cause is removed from psychiatry and given to physicians, such as neurologists, who deal with real illnesses.

But do not fret. This book is directly in the psychiatric mainstream. It presents all the categories, classifications, modalities, complexes, and "treatments" just as if they were the product of actual science. It's as complex and convincing as an elaboration on astrology or phrenology. Like any good pseudoscientific tract, it is so splendidly dense and pretentious that it will not lack for credulous readers.

Yesterday's forgotten "cause" and "treatment" for "schizophrenia" is replaced by the hottest new thing. Every coercive treatment applied to involuntary subjects who don't accept that they are in any way "sick" is deftly rationalized. A century from now this will stand as one of the most fascinating compendia of quackery American has produced.