Posted by Jan (145.53.141.105) on February 01, 2003 at 04:55:13:
In Reply to: Good Question! posted by Rich (172.134.188.3) on January 31, 2003 at 13:06:27:
Dear Rich,
Millon on page 504 describes the D-M personality as 'unconsciously encouraging others to take advantage of them'; so I would suggest that its - as the name implies - a maschochistic personality with depressive traits.
The ascetic Depressive Personality seems to be on the other side of the 'border' in the continuum; the plodding on and ascetism definitely has a self-suffering tinge!
All character styles are interrelated more or less, and the more I use the Oldham questionnair, the more I get convinced that one style is really only the top of the mountain, with 2-4 styles being very important too (either very high or very low).
The Oldham questionnair is really very helpful in seeing if a person is disorderly; most healthy people have scores <30-40%. The unhealthy ones often have scores of 70-100% on 3-4 styles (co-morbidity). Surprisingly it seems that very few people have 50% scores, the distribution seems to be bi-polar. If this is true it could be true that after all Oldham's theory of a continuum is not valid, that most people are either multi-styled (in which case the value of talking about one style would not be so meaningful) or disordered (in which case its not so helpful to talk about the 'normal variant' of the style.
However I have used the Oldham questionnaire only 15 times now, which clearly is to little to say something definite on this.
Jan
Jan
Jan