ABSTRACT
The obstacles to assessing personality disorders and their solutions remain a conundrum in clinical practice. In part, some of the obstacles are related to the elusive construct of “personality” and what makes it “disordered.” Likewise,measurement of any construct is dependent on the stability and accuracy of the measurement, as well as the nature of the tool used to perform the measurement. Physicians, for instance, suspected that microorganisms were responsible for certain disease processes, but only with the advent of amicroscopeandmicrobiologic techniques were they able to understand the nature of the pathologic agent and how to change the action of that agent. So it is with personality disorders. Identifying the quintessential elements of personality has been challenging, as has been finding the right tool to measure it.
