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In the first book to demonstrate that personality disorders can indeed be diagnosed and treated even in the young, renowned child psychiatrist Paulina Kernberg and her colleagues structure a mighty scaffold to support the evidence in hand and the evidence to come .. Their developmental perspective informs their identification of emerging pathological features at all levels of personality organization--neurotic, borderline, and psychotic. Marshaling commanding evidence from the literature (organized according to DSM nosology in order to preserve a common frame), the authors inflect their review of differential methods of assessing personality traits and behavior patterns with material drawn from their own clinical research and practice. Their textured portrayal of each individual disorder --hysterical/histrionic, avoidant, obsessive compulsive, borderline, narcissistic, antisocial, schizotypal, paranoid-- in children and (separately) in adolescents puts an authoritative end to the ongoing debate. This an unparalleled source of scientific scholarship and clinical wisdom.
