ABSTRACT
The official diagnostic nomenclature of the American Psychiatric Association separated out an axis of personality disorders from another axis of diagnostic syndromes such as anxiety, depression, schizophrenia. While the intent was to assure that a clinician diagnosing a patient would consider the personality dimensions of that patient, a clinician was prone to ignore the personality disorder axis altogether. A frequent observation on reviewing patient charts was that an Axis I syndrome diagnosis was noted, but under Axis II for personality disorders, the word “deferred” would appear. The diagnostician in contemporary psychiatry is looking for how patients are similar, i.e., how they have common symptoms that gain them entry into a diagnostic category, rather than how they are different from others. In the contemporary mental health scene, psychoanalytic thought must be integrated with biological forces when diagnosing the patient. A psychiatric diagnosis that ignores biology can be problematic.
