ABSTRACT
This chapter presents AMPD depictions of three well-known cases in the personality assessment literature. Madeline was the subject of Jerry Wiggins’ (2003) book, Paradigms of Personality Assessment, in which experts from five different personality assessment traditions independently evaluated and described the same individual. The case of Mr. Z was used to illustrate the virtues of a self-psychological approach to psychoanalysis by Heinz Kohut (1979), who described an unsuccessful initial treatment based on classical analysis and a second, successful treatment, based on his modified approach. Jeffrey Dahmer was a confessed and convicted serial killer whose personality was described by David Nichols (2006), who used the case to illustrate the potential of examining Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2; Hathaway et al., 1989) item content in order to derive a richer depiction of individual cases. We provided brief descriptions and selected assessment data for each of these cases to 25 practicing clinicians, who rated them using the AMPD framework. Results suggest that raters were able to do so reliably, and that the AMPD provides an efficient yet relatively comprehensive picture of these cases.
