Toward a New Personology:
An Evolutionary Model
Theodore Millon
ISBN 0471515736

FROM THE BOOK JACKET: 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, Homey 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-II-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: DSM-IV and Beyond (with Roger Davis), contributor to DSM-III, and full member of the Task Force for Axis II of 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 develop-ing the foundations of his conceptual model, Millon shows how it under-girds much of psychology in general, as well as psychopathologic theory, classification, assessment, and intervention.

Rooted in natural scientific principles and exhibiting all the intellectual rigor typical of its illustrious antecedents, this groundbreaking work is destined to be seminal in forming the next generation of mental health clinicians, researchers, and theorists. An essential tool for psychologists, psychiatrists and academic personality psychologists, it will broaden and deepen your understanding of personality and its disorders.

Table of Contents

Prologue
HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS

Chapter One
INTRODUCTION On Scientific Creativity and Theoretical Integration

Chapter Two
THEORY I: Evolutionary Foundations of Physical and Biological Science

Chapter Three
THEORY II: Concordance of Evolutionary Polarities and Psychological Science

Chapter Four
NOSOLOGY: Deriving a Classification for a Personological Science

Chapter Five
INSTRUMENTATION: Assessment of Personality Polarities, Domains, and Disorders

Chapter Six
INTERVENTION: Integrative Therapy for Personality Disorders

Epilogue
CLOSING REFLECTIONS

References

PROLOGUE
Historical Reflections

The reader may find it useful to know a few of the sources which inspired the author to write this text. Most significant has been the opportunity to participate in the recent renaissance of personology. Trends which previously led to a decline in studies of personality and its disorders have sharply reversed; personologic themes and issues that were given short shrift in the 1960s and 1970s have not only reemerged, but have moved into the limelight of clinical work. As written elsewhere (Millon, 1984), the long drought is over and a revival of the rich heritage of the 1940s and 1950s is underway. For some 30 years now, the enthusiasm that once characterized adherence to one or another personality theory, as well as faith in this or that personality instrument, has been buffeted by trivial, as well as just, criticisms. Additionally, the passage of time and the aging of once preeminent ideas and techniques have led not only to a creeping ennui, but also to the value schisms that inevitably separate generations. Hence, the marvelous theories (e.g., Lewin, Murray, Murphy, Sullivan) and incisive methods (e.g., Rorschach, TAT, Bender-Gestalt, figure drawing) of yesteryear have faded inexorably, or so it appears, to a status more benefiting quaint historic notions and intrigu-ing, albeit ancient, tools.

Were the powers that once enabled comprehensive and valid personality assessments a fantasy of the past, impertinent, if not grandiose, acts by a then immature and arrogant young science? Were the personality theories then espoused equally ill-considered, presumptuous aspirations of ill-informed and naive, if not cavalier, speculators who asserted knowledge to themselves far greater than "the facts" would warrant?

What were once the splendidly astute and discriminating clinical portrayals by Freud, Reich, and Horney, each of whom stirred our curiosities and inspired us to further our desire to know, had become outdated curiosities, grandiose speculations to be replaced by tightly focused and empirically anchored constructs. The conceptual models and cogent insights of Freud, Jung, and Adler resonated with our early, personally more prosaic efforts to penetrate and give order to the mysteries of patients' psychic worlds, but they too were out of vogue, skillfully rent by what can be termed the anticoherency and anticonsistency movements. No longer was personality to be seen as an integrated gestalt, a dynamic system comprising more than the mere sum of its parts. The pendulum swung toward empiricism and positivism; only "observable" facts were in the ascendancy. The personality configuration was segmented into its ostensive constituents, construed as stimulus-response (S-R) bonds by some, statistical factors by others, dimensional traits elsewhere, and so on. This loose, anti-coherency amalgam, however divergent its members may have been on other scores - and they were quite vociferous about their disagreements - did agree on one matter - that personality was best disassembled, arranged in one set of component parts or another. Given that most were nomothetically, rather than idiographically inclined, this new breed of quasi-empiricist made a shambles of the inspired "personality-as-a-coherent-whole" theories which nurtured those who entered the clinical field in the post-World War II era.