Broken Structures: Severe Personality Disorders and Their Treatment

This outstanding book by Dr. Akhtar offers a fresh and novel classification of severe personality disorders. He meticulously outlines the characteristics of each of the severe personality disorders and desribes in encyclopedic fashion the technical issues pertaining to their treatment, making this book a valuable desk reference for students as well as for seasoned clinicians. (Vamık D. Volkan, University of Virginia, author of "Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace")

This encyclopedic text is most impressive in its ability to organize all the personality disorders in a modern dimensional system while still retaining the nosological categories that emphasize the centrality of identity disturbances and splitting for the more severe forms. Utilizing his wide net of past and present papers and a clear and very readable style, Akhtar has combined the descriptive and dynamic without sacrificing depth of conceptualization for clarity. A wonderful work. (Melvin Singer)

Salman Akhtar, M.D. , is Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College, Lecturer on Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the Book Review Editor of the Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, an associate editor of the Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, member of the editorial board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, past member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, and an editorial reader for Psychoanalytic Quarterly.