Rep36 Understanding Personality Disorder

1.1.3 Classification of personality disorder
In Britain, personality disorder is often equated
with socially deviant behaviour because of
associations with the legal category of
Psychopathic Disorder in the 1959 and 1983
Mental Health Acts for England and Wales (‘a
persistent disorder or disability of mind…which
results in abnormally aggressive or seriously
irresponsible conduct on the part of the person
concerned’). However, the classifications of
personality disorder need to be based on
personality theory and not antisocial behaviour
or moral judgements (Blackburn, 1988).
The current classifications reflect the
influence of the German psychiatrist Schneider
(1950) who described personality disorders
(psychopathic personalities) as abnormal
personalities whose abnormality causes suffering
to himself or herself or the community.
Anticipating quantitative conceptions of
personality, he construed abnormal personality
statistically as deviation from average. Although
etymologically the adjective ‘psychopathic’
simply means ‘psychologically damaged’, in
Britain and America it was narrowed to mean
‘socially damaging’ (Blackburn, 1988), as
reflected in recent notions of psychopathy
(Hare, 1996) and the category of antisocial
personality disorder. Paradoxically, the broader
notion of personality disorder adopted in
current classifications originates in Schneider’s
typology of psychopathic personalities. 
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association,
1994) classification of personality disorder is
based on the concept of personality traits
described above. Traits, the basic units of
personality disorder, are defined in DSM-IV as
‘…enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to,
and thinking about the environment and
oneself…’ However, traits constitute personality
disorder only when they are ‘inflexible and