Customer Reviews

Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality

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Since I first read this text in 1973, I've continued to value its insights and periodically reread large sections.

Unless you enjoy dissertation-like historical development, though, skip the first six chapters. The "good stuff" is the explanation of the interpersonal reflex (how one's personality "pulls" predictable behavior from others) and the eight major sectors of the model.

Although written at a graduate school level, this book is worth the effort of slow reading and review.

Michael D. Nugent, Ph.D

I concur with Michael Nugent about the value of Leary's text on personality assessment. The book is a real tour de force, integrating many, many components of personal values and interpersonal style into a useful way of describing behavior. Pay particular attention to the personality types which Leary was the first to describe: the managerial-autocratic and the hypernormal. Although the book probably has been out of print for many years, any university library should have a copy.

Sam Braudt
Department of Psychiatry
Texas Tech University School of Medicine

This book is easily one of the most brilliant and satisfying methodological disquisitions I have ever read. Its systematic removal of the examining psychiatrist from a position of epistemological and social privilege is beautifully clear and logical (and -- which is rarer -- clearly and logically explained) and quite breathtaking in its philosophical (social and institutional) implications (for intellectual democracy and self-actualisation) within psychiatry.