Theodore Millon: Psychotherapy With Personality

Reviews the books, Overcoming Resistant Personality Disorders: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach by Theodore Millon and Seth Grossman (see record 2007-01551-000) and Moderating Severe Personality Disorders: A Personalized Psychotherapy Approach by Theodore Millon and Seth Grossman (see record 2007-01556-000). Both of the books covered here focus on the treatment of persons with standard Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders personality disorders or with other characterological disorders that Millon has described in the past (e.g., Aggressive/Masochistic). The first volume deals with the more benign resistant disorders such as dependent personality disorder, while the second book deals with the more severely impaired patients such as those with borderline personality disorder. Like most therapy books, these books convey much optimism about the ability of fairly disturbed people to change and assume a great deal of expertise on the part of the therapist. Finally, these books are based on Millon's theory and do not offer much empirical support. There is unfortunately a dearth of studies showing the merits of Millon's dimensional polarities, and some of the empirical studies available have not supported the theory. It would be useful to show that the work required for the proposed integration of the different therapeutic approaches and modalities adds substantially to what could be accomplished by spending the same amount of time with a narrower and less integrated range of interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)