Book Review: Personality Disorders: Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders. Second Edition. Aaron T Beck, Arthur Freeman, Denise D Davis, and Associates. New York: Guilford Press; 2004. 412 p. US$46.00. Reviewer rating: Fair This is a disappointing volume, even though it presents valuable concepts for understanding the cognitive component of personality disorder, as well as many useful interventions. The first edition, published in 1990, was a seminal contribution that offered a new perspective on the treatment of personality disorder, a topic previously dominated almost entirely by therapies based on psychoanalytic theory. In it, Beck and colleagues offered an innovative perspective that had a major impact. The limitation of the first edition was its modest evidential support for both overall approach and specific treatment strategies. Indeed, the authors noted that this was embarrassing in a mode of treatment that advocates empiricism. The widely anticipated second edition was expected to correct this deficiency by offering a theory that was more coherent and solidly grounded in empirical findings and evidence-based interventions. Alas, this volume fails to deliver. This edition has 16 chapters. The first 5 offer an overview of cognitive therapy for personality disorder, present the rudiments of a theory of personality disorder, discuss issues of assessment, outline general principles and specialized techniques, and explore the important issue of the therapeutic relationship. They are followed by 10 chapters, each describing the psychopathology and cognitive therapy of a specific disorder. All the DSM-IV personality disorders are considered, except for schizotypal and passive-aggressive personality disorder. The last chapter offers a brief synthesis and comments on prospects. Chapter 2 purports to describe a theory of personality disorder. The first edition offered a sketchy framework comprising a somewhat loosely arranged set of constructs and ideas. Although many of these ideas were useful, and probably essential, components of any theory, they were not systematically articulated. The corresponding chapter in this second edition offers little that is new. It combines the first edition's Chapters 2 and 3 and offers almost identical layout and subheadings-as if the field of personality disorder had remained unchanged for the last 15 years. In fact, ideas about the disorder's nature, origins, and classification have changed markedly and continue to do so. Many of these developments are barely referenced, let alone incorporated into the model or into intervention strategies. This is part of a more general problem: the book is written with scant attention to the context of scholarship in related fields. Particularly problematic is its neglect of current work on normal personality, especially research on cognitive approaches to personality. This research provides a body of knowledge about personality processes that could have greatly enriched the reviewed volume's framework and contributed to a more solid conceptual model. As with the first edition, much of this volume is organized in terms of DSM-IV diagnoses. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.058 | 0.044 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".