Abstract
As Sheets and Craighead (2007) note, the current organization of personality disorders (PDs) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is limited by excessive comorbidity among different forms of personality pathology and by co‐occurrence of symptoms from ostensibly unrelated PDs. In this commentary, I offer an alternative solution to the syndrome‐ and symptom‐level problems that characterize our current organization of PDs. This solution involves (a) formally conceptualizing each DSM PD using multiple theoretical frameworks, and (b) using psychological assessment data to obtain information relevant to key elements of these theoretical frameworks. Guidelines for multimodal assessment of PDs are offered, and suggestions for integrating diagnostic information and psychological test data are described.