The Structure and Dynamics of (Research On) Personality and Personality Disorders: A Joint Journey

It is a pleasure to present this year’s European Personality Review issue showcasing the first target article I have handled as editor in chief of EJP: ‘Interpersonal Dynamics in Personality and Personality Disorders’ by Christopher Hopwood. When Chris Hopwood sent me the proposal for his target paper, I was immediately thrilled by the idea of using interpersonal theory as a means to better bridge personality and clinical research, particularly since a better integration of structural and process-oriented dynamic approaches is a pressing theme for personality psychology. Apparently, this sentiment was not idiosyncratic: An unusually high percentage of both the personality and clinical psychology researchers we contacted agreed to contribute their comments to this issue. This makes this special issue an invaluable resource, a comprehensive and diverse representation of the state of personality and personality disorder research. But it also made it an unexpectedly Herculean task for the author of the target paper to respond to the plethora of comments in a rejoinder. I was relieved and thankful to see how Chris Hopwood accepted the challenge, carefully reflected on all of the various comments, and came up with an admirably clear and stimulating rejoinder. Working with Chris Hopwood on this special issue has been a most rewarding journey for me, and I want to express my deep gratitude for his dedicated and skilful work. He has offered our field a great service that I predict will have a sustainable influence. I also want to thank the many commenters who made this a joint endeavour and provided important questions, challenges, and additions to the outlined approach. Hopwood did a wonderful job in highlighting and showcasing why personality and clinical researchers should talk and listen more to each other given that they care deeply about the same things: the structure and dynamics of individual differences that are more or less adaptive in a given context. In the same way clinical psychology is well advised not to reinvent the structural wheel and more consequently to adopt structural models of personality psychology, personality is well advised to consider the rich repertoire of psychological dynamics underlying stable individual differences that are covered in clinical research and praxis. The structure of generalized self-concepts as assessed with personality and personality disorder questionnaires already provides important knowledge about the nature of personality. In order to move forward and to describe and understand personality variations in a more detailed way, however, more needs to be done. The burgeoning field of personality dynamics is reflective of this need, but it is indeed unfortunate that contemporary dynamic personality research rarely considers existing dynamic concepts from clinical psychology. In order to better integrate clinical concepts and insights into mainstream dynamic personality psychology, Hopwood argues for a more widespread use of interpersonal theory and the concept of the interpersonal situation (Pincus, Hopwood, & Wright, in press). This parsimonious framework allows for a fine-grained understanding of personality as individual differences in motivational-affective-behavioural-perceptual process sequences embedded in social situations. It deepens existing dynamic frameworks in personality psychology (e.g. Back et al., 2011; DeYoung, 2015; Fleeson & Jayawickreme, 2015; Geukes, van Zalk, & Back, 2018; Roberts, 2018; Wrzus & Roberts, 2017) in that it further specifies relevant variables and process chains and links them to detailed observations of accentuated personality configurations and their malleability in individuals. As Hopwood shows, this approach to describing personality disorders as well as personality more generally in terms of circumscribed interpersonal dynamics has straightforward implications for basic personality research. Specifically, it might help to define more clearly what individual differences a trait is supposed to encompass and to delineate more specific hypotheses on the dynamics that underlie the structure, development, and consequences of personality. Hopwood’s target paper is complemented by an impressively large and insightful set of comments. These comments express exactly what I had hoped for: enthusiasm for the topics that were addressed, engaged agreement and disagreement, and the stimulation of further thoughts and questions for future research on the dynamics of personality and personality disorders. They also led Chris Hopwood to further sharpen and clarify his thoughts in a rejoinder, in which he clearly outlined the many ways in which his approach resonates with other existing dynamic approaches and described the key conceptual and methodological challenges dynamic personality research faces. The whole package of this special issue is a rich resource for everyone who is interested in the intersection of personality and personality disorders and the interpersonal dynamics of personality more generally. Collectively, it outlines an agenda for how the field of personality and clinical research can be better integrated and, in doing so, move forward toward a joint understanding of personality variations. This special issue also speaks to broader conceptual topics in our field and continues a series of papers and discussions in the EJP on the very nature of personality European Journal of Personality, Eur. J. Pers. 32: 496–498 (2018) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/per.2177