Personality disorders are among the most intriguing and fascinating mental disorders. As they are characterized by pathological traits, not signs and symptoms, they are unsuitable for treatment with psychotropic drugs or other biological treatments.
A psychological understanding of these disorders is possible based on cognitive or psycho-dynamic explanations but the author argues that these theoretical models miss the essential point, as they Jack a foundational ground on what is specifically human in human beings, their
This paper proposes an existential understanding of personality disorders grounded on the being of man. A clinical practice oriented towards the phenomenological method conceives human beings as an “opening of meaning” where the entities of the world can show themselves. The “opening” however is structured and if one revealed content (for instance a biographical event) is misunderstood as a structural component that might generate a set of interrelated pathological personality traits.
A clinical case is presented to illustrate this process.