Social Domains, Personality, and Interpersonal Functioning

This chapter describes the domain organization of social relationships, how it emerges over development, and the implications of disorganization of domain structure for personality disorders. We describe a model of the organization of the developing personality in childhood and illustrate how deficits in this organization may contribute to adult personality disorders. In turn, this approach has implications for the conceptualization and measurement of adult personality functioning. The key idea is that there is a social organization of the mind involving a capacity both to perform within and to maintain a demarcation of social domains such as work, romance, and friendship.