François Lelord, Christophe André – Comment gérer les personalités difficiles (How to manage difficult people) – my review
This is a book written by two French psychiatrists and psychotherapists. It helped me a great deal to understand various people in my family or my circle of acquaintances whose behavior was hard to take at times. The personality types discussed here are: people with anxiety disorders, those with histrionic personality disorder, obsessional personalities, paranoids, narcissists, Type A personalities, schizoids, depressives, dependent, passive-aggressive and avoidant personalities. The authors give concrete examples of patients’ stories (of course, without divulging their real names), they make a list of traits for each one of the disorders, so that they’re easier to remember, and they tell us what is advisable and what is not recommended in each case. They also use humor and anecdotes, which makes the book easier to read even for a neophyte like myself. At the end of each chapter there is a short quiz for the readers to see if they suffer from that specific disorder. The causes of these...