ABSTRACT
Ju S T AS U L Y SSE S after passing Scylla and Charybdis, and Circe came to the calm harbor of Trinacria, so we have negotiated the rugged diagnostic journey of the personality disorders, to find that the diagnostic dilemma in our last group contrasts with the dilemmas of the other groups, as does a safe harbor with Scylla and Charybdis. Since the patients in this final group showed neither the dements of schizophrenia nor severe behavioral pathology, the grim, partially submerged obstacles of diagnostic difficulty have been automatically eliminated. A relatively safe harbor beckons: a psychoneurosis or a character neurosis. In some (but far from all) respects, this safety is an artifact, since we decided to forgo the differentiation between a psychoneurosis and a character neurosis, feeling that it was still an unsettled issue in psychiatry, that differentiation depended much upon psychoanalytic data and insight and therefore was beyond the scope of this study. Moreover, since the clinical pictures and outcome for the patients now claiming our attention not only had much in common but also differed significantly from those of patients with a personality disorder or schizophrenia, we felt that they could readily be studied as one separate group. The fact that we can eliminate schizophrenia and personality disorder from consideration conveys a wealth, not only of diagnostic meaning, but also of prognostic and therapeutic optimism. We can automatically place these adolescents in the diagnostic category whose outcome is universally the best of the lot.
