ABSTRACT
This book has tried to bring together two topics that, intuitively, seem very close but which, in practice, often remain apart – most of all, surprisingly, in clinical psychology. It is generally in personality psychology, academic abnormal psychology, and occasionally in psychiatry that the ideas we have discussed here now surface – but even then only occasionally and in fragmented form. In Chapter 1 we outlined the historical reasons for this, when explaining some past realignments of clinical psychology, abnormal psychology, and psychiatry in relation to one another. Considerations of professional rôle, and the ‘cognitive revolution’, caused clinical psychology to retreat from concern with issues about personality differences, especially where these invoke biology. This, we believe, has sometimes left clinical psychologists marooned without a convincing explanation, if and when they try to give a full account of why the patients they treat have come to be as they are. A good example is one we quoted in Chapter 4 when discussing Beck’s account of personality-disordered individuals. Beck’s characterizations of the various mental sets of such people are invaluable in defining targets for cognitive therapy. But is it not important to have as rounded an explanation as possible of the origins of the cognitions and behaviours being treated? In that respect Beck’s formulation is lacking.
