Beyond Traits: Personality as Intersubjective Themes

Abstract

The author argues that research in the idiographic tradition is more conducive to effective clinical work than the uncritical adoption of specific “evidence-based therapies” for discrete symptomatic disorders. She views pressures on therapists to adopt evidence-based therapies without consideration of individual differences and personal subjectivity as the misapplication of a research paradigm to the clinical situation. Reviewing some recent empirical work on individuality and therapeutic process, she critiques efforts to formulate personality diagnosis on the basis of externally observable traits without attention to internal experience, and she contends that intrapsychic themes account for personality differences more powerfully than traits, even when traits are construed dimensionally.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Kerry Gordon, Jaak Panksepp, and Jonathan Shedler for their help with the published version of this talk.

Editor's Note: This is an invited article based on a Master Lecture given March 16, 2012, at the Society for Personality Assessment Annual Conference in Chicago, IL.