A blind spot of family therapy

Given the historical aversion of systemic family therapy to focusing on the individual, both as an object of theoretical reflection and as an object of therapeutic intervention, it is hardly surprising that there is no discourse of its own on personality disorders. Indeed, not only was the root “psycho” removed from the name of the model, but individual diagnosis was energetically abominated, following in the footsteps of Bateson, who disqualified it as a dormitive concept (Bateson, 1972). This is understandable, for family therapy was born with an avowed alternative vocation, one of epistemological revolution, and for many years it legitimately devoted itself to creating instruments to intervene on relationships. Only recently has a coherent movement of rectification begun, based on the evidence that interventions do not take place on relationships in the abstract, but on individuals in relationship.

This movement, however, has not yet reached the necessary process of elaborating a relational psychopathology and, even less, succeeded in generating a systemic discourse on personality disorders, a terrain on which it becomes particularly evident that one cannot do without a relational theory of personality. And, although this is not the place to improvise a task that must necessarily be rigorous and painstaking, the need to begin addressing it is pressing.

A definition of personality

Gold and Bacigalupe carried out a meticulous review of interpersonal and systemic theories of personality (Gold and Bacigalupe, 1998) and could find little else than Harry Stack Sullivan’s interpersonal theory (Sullivan, 1953) as a specific proposal, one that inspired many systemic authors. Among its many theoretical merits is that of having coined the term “self-system”, to designate a personality shaped in the gaze of others. But Sullivan continued to exercise his therapeutic practice in a dyadic relationship with patients, and the family therapists who came after him lost interest in personality as an intrapsychic concept.

What is personality from the relational point of view? Here is a possible definition: “the individual dimension of accumulated relational experience, in dialogue between past and present, and framed by a biological substrate and by a cultural context”. It is worth examining its ingredients one by one.

Individual dimension. It is necessary to accept that this is an individual concept. Otherwise, one would go on thinking in terms of relational schemas or patterns, but not of personality.

Accumulated relational experience. This is a re-edition of the old Batesonian concept of schismogenesis, which, as is well known, emphasized the idea, revolutionary in its time, that people are shaped and defined by the relationship, rather than the other way round.

Dialogue between past and present. We are the product of a history and, from this point of view, the past in which relational experience unfolded defines personality. But history is continually rewritten in the present, from which it is possible to redefine the past.

A model mechanically dependent on the past is, for example, a hydraulic dam: so many hectolitres lost, so many hectolitres to be regained in order to recover a given level. But personality is a communicational concept, closer to a computer model, where a simple click on an icon immediately and spectacularly fills the whole screen with a new image. This is why it is also possible, from the present, to induce spectacular changes in the past, and why the dialectical tension between past and present is such an important element in the definition of personality.

Biological substrate. The human organism, and most particularly the central nervous system, are the hardware of personality. Genetics surely plays an important role in the transmission of certain predispositions to develop particular personality traits.

Cultural context. Culture frames and overdetermines personality, decisively influencing its definition (Falicov, 1998). Being extraverted does not have the same meaning in a Nordic country and in the Caribbean, nor even, within the same country, in the Peruvian sierra or on the Peruvian coast. Cultures develop mythologies that privilege certain personality traits over others, conditioning their inscription in the psychological heritage of their members.

Relational nurturing

The most important element of the relational experience that accumulates to serve as the basis for the construction of individual personality is the subjective experience of being loved. From birth, the child processes the relationship with its parents in terms of love, but this is a complex love, which bears little resemblance to romantic love (that sublime simplification). The complex love with which personality is built is a relationally nurturing process which, far from consisting in a purely affective phenomenon, has cognitive, emotional and pragmatic ingredients. There is therefore a loving thinking, a loving feeling and a loving doing.

To build a mature personality, the child needs to perceive itself as recognized as an independent individual, endowed with needs of its own, distinct from those of its parents. The failure of recognition, or disconfirmation, is a failure of relational nurturing on the cognitive terrain, which can entail serious handicaps for the construction of personality. The same is true, without leaving the cognitive component of relational nurturing, of disqualification, which is a failure of the valuing of personal qualities by the significant figures of the relational environment.

Parents may be tender and affectionate with their children and prove incapable of recognizing or valuing them adequately. But the opposite may also occur, and it is then the emotional level that registers the failure of parental functions. This is the case of parents who are distant, rejecting or hostile towards their children because they perceive them as obstacles to their own individual fulfilment, or as allies of the other in a situation of conjugal disharmony. Nurturing deficiencies in the relationship with one parent may be compensated for by the other, but these compensations do not always occur or are not always sufficient. And, in any event, a mature personality cannot be built without the emotional contributions of relational nurturing, which are affection and tenderness.

As for the pragmatic components of complex love or relational nurturing, they boil down mainly, as far as the parent-child bond is concerned, to socialization, with its double aspect, protective and normative. A good accommodation of the individual to society is fundamental for survival and is, to a large extent, the responsibility of the parents; to be fully successful, it requires an adequate coupling of protection and normativity. But both may possibly fail, by deficiency as well as by excess. The child’s personality may then suffer the negative consequences.

On the basis of this fundamental baggage, the child organizes its relational experience in narrative terms, that is, by constructing stories that give meaning to everything that happens to it. And some of these stories are selected to constitute identity, in which the individual recognizes himself and on which he does not easily agree to compromise. The content of the individual narrative, both the identity-bearing part and the part that is not, as well as the relationship between the two, constitutes the fabric of personality. It matters that identity should be solid, neither cramped nor hypertrophied, in order to serve as an adequate anchor for a non-identity narrative that should be as rich and varied as possible. And it goes without saying that relational nurturing, as complex love, constitutes the material with which the whole structure is built.

Parentality and conjugality

From this perspective, the importance of the family as the crucible of personality becomes evident. Beyond genetic factors that are difficult to assess and impossible to modify, the family is the main vehicle of cultural conditioning and, moreover, the space where the relational stimuli most influential on individual maturation (relational nurturing) are generated and developed. It should therefore not be surprising that the family is focused on when it comes to understanding some of the most important enigmas concerning normal and pathological personality. And, what is more, it must be a focus demanding in conceptual rigour and rich in nuance, which is not limited to considering the family as a place where children are socialized by being taught to imitate adapted behaviours. The complex equation that is relational nurturing is composed, as we have seen, of multiple and extremely subtle elements, which depend on the idiosyncrasy of each family. It is nevertheless possible to draw out a few general laws.

The child’s immediate environment, that is, its family of origin, is organized by two relational dimensions of great importance, generally embodied by the parents. These are conjugality and parentality (Linares, 1996), which represent two versions of relational nurturing, understood respectively as conjugal love and parental love.

Conjugality, in a couple with a family vocation, is founded on a cognitive, emotional and pragmatic reciprocity, through which the two members negotiate an agreement that involves a loving thinking (recognition and valuing), a loving feeling (tenderness and affection) and a loving doing (desire and sexuality, mainly). All this requires exchange, that is, an exercise of giving and receiving in a balanced way, with an important egalitarian component.

By contrast, parentality rests on a complementary, that is, unequal, relationship, in which giving and receiving cannot be balanced. There is no doubt that parents receive strong gratification from raising their children, but the chain is fundamentally linear and, for the benefit of the species, each generation pays to the one that follows it the debt it contracted towards the preceding one. Parental love comprises, just like conjugal love, cognitive elements that involve recognition and valuing, and emotional elements that pass through affection and tenderness. As for the pragmatic components, the differences are radical, since parental loving doing consists, fundamentally, in the exercise of socialization. This is nothing other than an adequate preparation for integration into society, and it is composed of two elements of equal importance: normativity, which must guarantee the individual’s respect for society, and protection, charged with ensuring that this respect is reciprocal.

Depending on whether or not it fulfils the conditions of conjugal love, conjugality will be harmonious or disharmonious. However, harmony implies the capacity to resolve conjugal conflicts reasonably, including through separation and divorce; so that, from the point of view of their influence on the children, couples who negotiate adequately can be considered conjugally harmonious, regardless of their marital status. Moreover, conjugality and parentality are independent relational variables, though with a certain degree of reciprocal influence. This is why it is worth considering the possibilities of a primary preservation or deterioration of parentality, prior to any influence that conjugality might exert on it.

Just as individual personality is built with identity and narrative, the family system is articulated in terms of mythology and organization. Family mythology is the space where the individual narratives of the system’s members converge, and from which they spring. It therefore constitutes a territory of narrative negotiation, whose result are the myths, in which a particular emotional climate coexists with cognitive elements, which are values and beliefs, and pragmatic elements, which are rituals. In turn, organization is the result of the evolutionary development of family structures throughout the life cycle, and within it one distinguishes aspects as important as hierarchy, cohesion and adaptability. Family mythology and organization condition each other, while offering an extremely rich relational framework for the construction and development of the personality of the system’s members.

Family relational dysfunctions

The combination of the two relational dimensions described, conjugality and parentality, creates, according to their relative predominance, four major possible modalities of family of origin, as shown in figure 1. Among them, the one defined by harmonious conjugality and primarily preserved parentality is the one that offers the greatest possibilities of providing fully satisfactory relational nurturing. In it, the parents have a good capacity to adequately resolve the conflicts they experience as a couple, while raising their children with a good loving offer at the cognitive, emotional and pragmatic levels.

Families with dysfunctional tendencies occupy the other three quadrants of figure 1, always depending on the presence within them of the relational dimensions mentioned.

Triangulating families are those in which disharmonious conjugality combines with primarily preserved parentality. The parents, reasonably involved at the outset in satisfying the children’s nurturing needs, lose their bearings when serious difficulties in resolving their own conjugal conflicts erupt. And they may eventually end up turning to the children with various proposals of alliance, creating problems for them that denote the secondary deterioration of parentality. From this point of view, we define triangulation as the dysfunctional involvement of children in the resolution of the parents’ relational problems.

Figure 1 – The four modalities of family of origin according to conjugality and parentality (reconstruction).

When the parents do not present notable difficulties at the conjugal level, but prove primarily incompetent in the exercise of parentality, we speak of deprivation, a situation that generates significant deficiencies in the children’s relational nurturing. This modality of family generally provides for their material needs, and even offers them positive models of socialization, based on an adequate or even, possibly, excessive normativity. These are formally well-adapted parents, who do not attract the attention of social services and are well regarded by mental health services, but who fail at the deepest levels, where their own nurturing needs take precedence over those of the children.

If disharmonious conjugality coexists with primarily deteriorated parentality, the relational situation in which the children are raised may be described as chaotic. These are families with very serious nurturing deficiencies, which expose their children to all kinds of risks, of which severe failures of socialization are not the least. However, because their deficiencies are so evident, these families can easily generate compensatory resources, both external and internal. The external ones come with corrective interventions, therapeutic or supportive, whether spontaneous or professional, while the internal ones are a side effect of disharmonious conjugality, which may provoke paradoxical parental reactions in one of the two parents.

Personality disorders in psychiatric nosology

Since the first attempts to classify mental disorders, clinical pictures characterized by maladaptive behaviour, low social productivity and a lack of moral conscience have been described. Emil Kraepelin, in the 1915 edition of his famous psychiatry textbook, introduced the term psychopathic personality which, in keeping with the orientations dominant in the Germany of the time, took on the connotations of a hereditary-degenerative pathology with biological roots. Such was the dominant conception for as long as German leadership of psychiatry lasted, and the character who best illustrated it was the immoral or amoral delinquent, who ended his life in prison or in the asylum.

But the defeat of Nazism made it impossible to maintain proposals too contaminated by complicity with the horrors of the concentration camps. Furthermore, Partridge had introduced in the United States the term sociopathy, much more in keeping with the American ideology of the New Deal, saturated with sociological optimism (Partridge, 1930). Of course, the American dream could also fail, but when that happened, in the marginal neighbourhoods of the big cities, the emblematic character was a violent but reasonably socialized gangster.

In the 1950s, the American social work movement landed in the field of mental health, finding the term sociopathy still too medical for its taste. The characteristic object of social workers’ intervention remained the same, namely violence, abuse, drug addiction and, ultimately, marginality and poverty; but, from their epistemology, they proposed as an alternative the new concept of the multiproblem family, which represented a further step in the sociologization of the field. There has always been debate, and there still is today, as to whether poverty is a relevant factor in the deterioration of mental health (Costello, 2003).

Simultaneously, the borderline syndrome or disorder, which was soon to become borderline personality disorder, emerged with the intention of filling the space existing between psychosis and neurosis, which was, in a way, the one already occupied by the old psychopathy. Except that, from then on, the latter was reborn stripped of geneticist contents and with a clear will towards psychoanalytic understanding. Over the years, borderline personality disorder has moved ever further from its first psychopathological meaning of a psycho-neurotic borderline disorder, to take on contents proper to the psychopathic personality. And, even today, wide sectors of opinion continue to regard it as incurable and are surprised when these patients improve in the course of treatment (Gunderson, 2003).

Personality disorders in current psychiatry

We thus arrive at the last significant step of psychiatric nosology in classifying personality disorders. The American Psychiatric Association, in its series of diagnostic and statistical manuals of mental disorders (the successive DSMs), ended up distinguishing an Axis II, specific to personality disorders, distinct from Axis I, which corresponds to clinical disorders. In this way a profound dichotomy is introduced between clinical symptoms and personality, which need not maintain any mutual relationship. As we shall see below, this separation has no justification from the psycho-relational point of view, which naturally imposes a continuity between the different psychological manifestations, normal and pathological.

Axis II of DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) distinguishes three clusters of personality disorders:

It is evident that, with a small modification (moving histrionic disorder from cluster B to cluster C), the three clusters overlap with the three major areas of classical psychiatry: psychoses (cluster A), psychopathies (cluster B) and neuroses (cluster C). But, for what concerns us here, it is also worth dwelling on the specific characteristics of cluster B.

On the one hand, the panorama is notably enriched with the inclusion of three distinct and complementary modalities: a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others (antisocial disorder), a pervasive pattern of impulsive instability in interpersonal relationships (borderline disorder) and a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and lack of empathy (narcissistic disorder).

On the other hand, the social dimension of personality disorders, formerly represented by sociopathies and, in extreme form, by multiproblem families, disappears almost entirely. To find its vestiges in DSM-IV, one has to rummage through the small print of Axis I, where, under the heading Other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention, phenomena appear such as: relational problems (parent-child, partner, sibling), problems related to abuse or neglect (physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect of child), child or adolescent antisocial behavior, as well as adult antisocial behavior, etc. In short, a veritable disintegration and dispersion of the most social aspects of personality disorders, which, in practice, prevent clinicians from handling them diagnostically.

Social bonding disorders

All the names used by psychiatry to designate conduct disorders with a deficit of social adaptation, supposedly centred on pathological personality structures, have been proposed from partial and biased perspectives, lacking an integrated vision of the human being. This is the case of biologistic psychopathy, of sociologistic sociopathy and multiproblem family and, of course, of the DSM-IV personality disorders, artificially separated from the rest of psychic manifestations.

Consistent with the definition of personality proposed here from a relational perspective, personality disorder necessarily underlies any structured psychopathological manifestation, since there is no solution of continuity in the psyche. We shall therefore distinguish four major psychopathological areas, each endowed with a specific space of problematic personality, and we shall argue for the existence of certain underlying relational particularities, which are also specific. These are the three major categories of classical psychiatry, to which a fourth would be added, corresponding to depressions, detached from the psychotic field:

Some relational hypotheses for personality disorders

Reflecting on the most important relational dysfunctions that can occur under the sign of triangulation, deprivation and chaotization (figure 1), it is possible to describe some correspondences with the psychopathological areas just mentioned and, consequently, with the specific underlying problematic personalities (what are called personality disorders). Figure 2 shows a possible scheme for locating these correspondences.

Neurotic disorders lie fully within the space of triangulations (fig. 2, “1”). Indeed, since the Oedipal metaphor that inspired the psychoanalytic theory of neuroses, these have been associated with a relational situation defined by an alliance with one parent and a conflictual relationship with the other. It is evident that the underlying conjugal disharmony in the parental couple, together with a primary interest in the children that makes them desirable allies, constitutes the breeding ground for the development of these triangulations, which we shall call manipulative. Neurotic symptoms can nest in the folds of these triangulated relationships, which admit of many formulas and combinations. But it is here, moreover, that the cluster C personality disorders will be located, defined preferentially by anxiety, such as avoidant and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as, possibly, histrionic disorder, which belongs to cluster B.

Psychotic disorders (fig. 2, “2”) can be understood, from the relational point of view, as a result of disconfirmation, a communicational phenomenon consisting in the subjective experience of the negation of one’s own existence by significant figures on whom one depends. Although disconfirmation occurs with maximum frequency and intensity in situations of triangulation, it can also arise in those of deprivation and chaotization. The cluster A personality disorders, namely schizoid, schizothymic and schizotypal, will follow a similar distribution.

Depressive disorders respond to a relational pattern presided over fundamentally by demandingness and lack of valuing or disqualification, which tends to occur frequently in the space of deprivations (fig. 2, “3”). This concerns above all what is called major depression, accompanied, in its relational location, by depressive personality disorder and, possibly, by dependent personality disorder, which belongs to cluster C. The extension of the depressive area towards the space of chaotizations (fig. 2, “4”) corresponds to bipolar disorder, which, while sharing with major depression the substrate of disqualification, generally presents, unlike the latter, a primarily deteriorated parentality.

As for social bonding disorders, which constitute the central theme of this chapter, they appear distributed among the three dysfunctional relational spaces (fig. 2, “5”). Applying the logic of DSM-IV, these would be personality disorders in an almost pure state, without any other admixture of clinical manifestations recordable in Axis I than those other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention mentioned above. We shall nevertheless include under this heading the main variants of social maladjustment which, throughout the history of psychiatry, have been typified and described as psychopathological disorders. Three major groups can thus be distinguished:

Specific relational hypotheses for social bonding disorders

1. Sociopathies

In fig. 2, “5”, different areas can be observed, distributed across the three spaces of relational dysfunction, corresponding to triangulations, deprivations and chaotizations.

Sociopathies are located squarely in the space of chaotizations (fig. 2, “6”), defined by disharmonious conjugality and primarily deteriorated parentality. These are, indeed, families which, very early on, often from the very constitution of the founding couple, fail both at the conjugal level, sinking into an ocean of disagreements and misunderstandings, and at the parental level, falling into massive neglect of the children. These two features may appear in the wake of critical and unprecedented life circumstances, but it is more frequent for them to be transmitted from generation to generation, fostered by the culture of poverty and social uprooting in which these families are generally immersed.

The parents, often very young, quarrel continually, engaging in episodes of notable violence that lead them to abandon each other and separate, as often as to reconcile and get back together. Fidelity is not a very relevant quality in this context; it is therefore not strange that sporadic relationships with third parties are established, sometimes in a climate of frank promiscuity, nor that, in the resulting abandonments, single-parent families proliferate. If violence can be the expression of conjugal frustration, channelled through impulsivity and tendencies to act out, sex is converted into a pseudo-solution, charged with creating the fiction of a solid bond that in reality does not exist. This is why these couples convey an impression of tormented, contradictory and disconcerting passion, capable of deceiving naive observers.

In an atmosphere as explosive as it is chaotic, children come into the world marked with the seal of abandonment to their fate. The prolific character of these families disorients social services, which tend to attribute it to sheer irresponsibility, whereas its meaning is more complex. Irresponsible, yes, if by that we mean lacking the reflective capacity that would make it possible to anticipate the children’s needs and guarantee their satisfaction, but also desperately clinging to a prolific, physically vigorous parentality, in contrast with their relational deterioration. Here again we witness an attribution of symbolic meaning, which seeks to see in parental bonds the transgenerational rootedness that is so dramatically lacking. This is why, paradoxically, and not only out of a desire to do harm, these families react ferociously when they see themselves threatened with the loss of their children.

But, in the meantime, there is no doubt that the latter may meet an uncertain fate, at the mercy of a chaos which, at times, turns out to have cruel laws. Poorly dressed, poorly fed and with rudimentary personal hygiene, they attract attention at school through their lateness and absenteeism, or because they bear the stigmata of physical violence. Neighbours report the neglect, when they are not the subject of a tragic news item about a domestic accident, against the relational backdrop of the parents’ quarrels, the untimely visits of no less violent lovers and the continual abuse of alcohol and other drugs. And it is not surprising that all this has effects on the children’s personality, which, at the very least, will develop with defective socialization, on both the normative and the protective sides.

But chaotic families have a very important quality: their capacity, also paradoxical, to generate relational resources on what, at first, appears to be nutritionally sterile ground. These resources come indiscriminately from inside or outside the system, and can be understood as ecological reactions to the profound structural deficiency, provocatively exhibited to the four winds. The deeper the chasm separating the parents and the more they are immersed in destructive dynamics, the more one of them may react by taking the helm of the family and saving the children from shipwreck. Furthermore, at any moment, the extended family may intervene, drawing on its meagre strength to provide modest but timely help. Not to mention other external agents, both spontaneous and professional, who are prompted to intervene to address the deficiencies of all kinds that the situation brings to light. These interventions may prove counterproductive if they are carried out exclusively from perspectives of control, repression or substitution, but, very often, they represent contributions of relational nurturing that are precious for the maturation of the children’s personality.

This is one of the reasons why, although these relationally chaotic families are a breeding ground for sociopathy, not all their members follow that path. The other reasons are attributable to complexity and uncertainty.

2. Borderline disorders

The location of borderline disorders in the scheme of basic relational dysfunctions of the family of origin (fig. 2, “7”) shows two possible variants, one in the space of triangulations and the other in that of deprivations. Such is also, for the time being, the hypothesis concerning narcissistic disorder, including malignant narcissism (Kernberg, 1984).

Triangulations arise when a primarily preserved parentality is secondarily deteriorated by the impact of a disharmonious conjugality, so that the children find themselves invited to take part, with little possibility of escaping, in the parents’ dysfunctional relational games. As we have seen, there are various modalities of triangulation, among which the manipulative ones are related to neurotic phenomena and the disconfirming ones to psychotic phenomena. In this context, we may call equivocal triangulation a relational situation in which the parents, very distant from each other, neglect the child’s upbringing in the self-interested belief that the other is taking care of it. Each fulfils their functions reluctantly, without much concealing their weariness and displeasure, with the feeling that what they do is the unjust result of the other’s inhibition. In one variant, the child has a very close, almost fusional parent, who does not admit the slightest hesitation in the unconditionality of the relationship, while the other takes the opportunity to withdraw inflexibly. In the long run, when the life cycle imposes dynamics of autonomization, the former ends up distancing themselves in turn. It may also happen that the allied parent is cold and not very nurturing, while the antagonist is warmer and more intense, but rigid and authoritarian. Neither of the two offers, in any case, a solid hold to bond with.

In the space of deprivations, relational dynamics develop that are defined by a primarily deteriorated parentality and a harmonious conjugality, generally under the sign of complementarity. The parents, on good terms with each other, prove incapable of responding to the child’s nurturing needs, perceiving it as a nuisance and full of faults. If demandingness and low valuing of its efforts predominate, the outcome is likely to move towards major depression; but if what stands out is an attitude of rejection, mixed with a pseudo-hyperprotection that aims more at getting rid of the child’s demanding and tiresome presence than at satisfying its needs, the foundations are being laid for the development of a borderline disorder. In both cases, the child’s relational nurturing is profoundly affected, beneath a surface of exquisite respect for the appearances of social adequacy. But whereas, in the first case, a normative hypersociability arises, which makes the depressive a slave to the honourability of the façade, in the second, social normativity fails, and with it the capacity to build stable bonds.

3. Antisocial disorder

Fig. 2, “8” shows antisocial disorders straddling the space of deprivations and that of chaotizations. This is because, in both spaces, the circumstances conducive to patterns of antisocial behaviour can come together, involving a profound relational malnourishment tinged with the most complete failure of normativity.

The deprived root of antisocial disorder can be activated when, in the relational context of deprived borderline disorder, the rejection of the child becomes so evident that it dominates any inclination towards socialization. As for the chaotic root, it can be operative when the harsh conditions of sociopathy are not tempered by internal or external compensatory resources. In both cases, the foundations are laid for the development of behaviours that involve disregard for and violation of the rights of others, turned into an object of immediate satisfaction of one’s own desires and whims. Veritable human predators, the subjects raised in this way illustrate better than others the maxim that evil exists, and is nothing other than the absence of love.

Final considerations

Everything set out above concerning personality disorders rests on clinical research into the relational bases of psychopathology, which has been developing for years and has already borne some significant fruit in the fields of depressive disorders (major depressions and dysthymias) (Linares and Campo, 2000) and psychoses (Linares, Castelló and Colilles, 2001). The programme corresponding to personality disorders is currently under way, and the ideas set out here constitute a first outline of it.

Personality disorders do not constitute an independent territory in the field of psychopathology, and they do not overlap arbitrarily or randomly with other symptomatic manifestations. On the contrary, there is a coherent continuum in the human mind, which means that a specific personality is necessarily present in every psychic phenomenon, normal or pathological.

The four major spaces of psychopathology – neuroses, psychoses, depressions and social bonding disorders – accordingly possess their respective dimensions of problematic personality, which, in turn, correspond to as many areas of relational dysfunction. Among the four, social bonding disorders, heirs to the old psychopathic personalities, are the ones that form the privileged object of reflection of these pages; they are in turn divided into three groups endowed with different relational substrates in the families of origin: sociopathies (chaotizations), borderline disorders (triangulations and deprivations) and antisocial disorders (deprivations and chaotizations).

Delinquency and crime, the maximal and extreme expressions of social bonding disorders, can be reached from any of their variants, but also from relational normality and the absence of psychopathology, depending on the concurrent individual, family and social circumstances (Lykken, 1995).

Likewise, the infinite capacity of the ecosystem to generate relationally nurturing resources can make resilient subjects marked by the most adverse circumstances, preserving them from falling into these pathologies as into others.