RELIABILITY AND CONVERGENCE OF 3 CONCEPTS OF NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY

UNTIL recent years, the personality disorders have been relatively une xplored compared to other psychiatric diagnoses. Over 15 years ago, th ere was little agreement on the diagnosis of borderline personality di sorder (Ferry and Klerman 1978), but efforts to specify the constructs and respective criteria for the borderline diagnosis spurred a pletho ra of systematic research, The result is that, next to antisocial pers onality disorder, borderline has become one of the best-documented and validated personality disorders (Ferry and Vaillant 1989), One import ant shift has been that good descriptive studies have gradually led to studies of etiological factors, such as childhood physical and sexual abuse, and severe neglect (Herman et al, 1989; Ferry and Herman 1992) , which in turn have led to empirically based treatment approaches (He rman 1992; Ferry et al. 1990), Despite inclusion in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III and DSM-III-R), narci ssistic personality is still at the beginning of this process of descr iption, empirical testing, and validation (Gunderson et al. 1991). Thi s study empirically examines three descriptions of narcissistic person ality in order to look for common underlying dimensions that may have etiological and treatment significance.