In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts present career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, and their major practical theoretical contributions.
In this fascinating collection, Professor Gordon Claridge charts the development of a model of mental health that blurs the line between madness and sanity, conditions such as schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis seen as dimensions of 'normal' personality and temperament rather than separate abnormalities. Working with, and influenced by, the late Hans Eysenck, Claridge is celebrated for evolving research on personality and psychological disorders into a revised view of the spectrum of psychotic traits. The concept of schizotypy, re-evaluated by Claridge, sees mental illness not as a pathology suffered by a few, but as the end of a continuum experienced by us all. Psychopathology and Personality Dimensions brings together some of the author's most influential publications on the topics of schizotypy and psychoticism, personality disorders, and the use of drug techniques to investigate normal and abnormal individual differences.
Interspersed throughout with specially-written retrospectives by Professor Claridge, looking back at his work and contextualising where it sits in the wider literature, the collection illustrates a radical and influential model of mental illness that continues to resonate today. This book is an essential resource for all those engaged or interested in the field of personality and psychological disorders.
About the Author: Gordon Claridge is Professor of Abnormal Psychology at the University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology and Emeritus Fellow Magdalen College, and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Over an exceptional career spanning nearly sixty-five years, and as a past President of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, he has been at the forefront of research around the theme of schizotypy, investigating, from several different angles, the major psychological disorders, adopting a psychometric, dimensional, predominantly biological approach.
