Competing Models of Personality Disorders

This paper reviews the virtues of applying a dimensional model and/or the more traditional categorical model to classification of personality disorders. The authors suggest how the particular merits of both might be incorporated. A model is proposed that organizes personality typology around a dimension of severity of impairment or dysfunction. This model would utilize the categorical model for those patients with the more severe functional failures for which traditional etiological research is most likely to bear fruit, and it would utilize the dimensional model for less functionally impaired patients whose psychopathology merges with normalcy.