Histrionic Personality Disorder and Self-Image

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Individuals with Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD) view themselves as gregarious, sociable, friendly, and agreeable. They consider themselves to be charming, stimulating, and well-liked. They value the capacity to attract people via their physical appearance and by appearing to be interesting and active people. For individuals with HPD, indications of internal distress, weakness, depression, or hostility are denied or suppressed and are not included in their sense of themselves (Millon & Davis, 1996, p. 369).

For individuals with HPD, vanity and seductiveness function to bolster and maintain self-esteem; they often become overinvested in how they look and dread aging (McWilliams, 1994, pp. 312). Growing old violates the view of themselves as glamorous and attractive people who are admired by others.

The HPD self is experienced as a small, fearful, and defective child who has to cope in a world dominated by powerful others (McWilliams, 1994, p. 310). For example, one professional man, diagnosed with HPD, repeatedly dreamed that he was a Volkswagen Beetle trying to keep up with larger, more powerful cars on an area freeway.

Individuals with HPD are consumed with attention to superficialities and spend little time or attention on their internal life. Because they know themselves so little, they often have no sense of who they are apart from their identification with others. They are able to change their attitudes and values depending upon the views of significant others in their lives. These individuals also fail to attend the details and specifics of their experiences. They have, accordingly, memories that are diffuse and general with a tremendous lack of detail (Will, Retzlaff, ed., 1995, p. 99).

View of Others

Individuals with Histrionic Personality Disorder experience others as powerful and capable in relation to their own sense of being a small, fearful, and defective child (McWilliams, 1994, p. 310). This view of themselves as less powerful allows these individuals to absolve themselves from responsibility for their own behavior and to engage in manipulative behavior with others to force attention and care-taking They will behave in a seductive and enticing manner until they are denied what they are seeking. Individuals with HPD become intensely angry toward others they see as withholding.

Individuals with HPD focus on others to the point that they obtain their own identity from those to whom they are attached. Yet the attention they focus on others does not allow them to gain understanding of others or to become effectively empathic. Their intense observation skills are dedicated to determining what behaviors, attitudes, or feelings are most likely to result in winning the admiration and approval of others. Essentially, these individuals watch other people watch them. Their actual focus is on how they are doing and how they are being received by others. As a result, they are not particularly effective in understanding how others are feeling. Individuals with HPD are inclined to define relationships with or connections to others as closer or more significant than they really are. They do not see when they are being humored or placated by people who may have lost patience with their relentless need for attention and the failure to relate in a genuine way. Others may eventually withhold their own efforts to relate to individuals with HPD once they become aware that there is no real attempt to connect -- rather there is a continuing demand to be attended to and admired. Basically, it is analogous to how well the actor or actress actually "knows" their audience beyond reading whether or not the performance is being well received.

continue: Relationships and Issues with Authority

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Reviewed: 04/2006