Context: “No experienced clinician will content himself with mere type-description, but beginners … are easily misled by typology to rely on such descriptions too much, and once the patients have been labelled psychopaths, it may be felt that there is no further problem to solve. …” (Kurt Schneider 1950)
Despite Schneider's caveat, the psychiatric approach to personality remains a primitive and often moralising typology drawn from a mish-mash of prejudicial description and speculative psychological mechanics. Typing is useful for disposal rather than treatment and seems otherwise to have reached an intellectual dead-end.
Objectives: This paper examines some problems of psychiatric personality typing and alternative methods and conceptions taken in the psychological literature.
Key messages: The most interesting alternative is the ‘lexical’ approach to personality which draws on the continuously updated historical information embedded in human language. It is the foundation of the dimensional five factor personality descriptors.
Conclusion: Alternatives to personality typing will be more use to solve the ‘further problems’ for patients and therapists.
