Pathological Altruism and Personality Disorder
The purpose of this chapter is to understand pathological altruism from the perspective of personality theory and research. Altruism is one of the facets of a well-validated dimension of general personality structure. This dimension—agreeableness—has both adaptive and maladaptive variants. Some maladaptive variants of altruism (e.g., excessive self-sacrifice) are part of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic criteria for a dependent personality disorder. Empirical support for this conceptualization of pathological altruism is discussed, along with two case illustrations.
Keywords: dependent personality disorder, five-factor model, pathological altruism
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .