Theodore Millon

Brief Biography

Theodore Millon was born in 1928 in the Brooklyn section of New York City. His family was Jewish, his father having immigrated to the US from Lithuania and his mother from Poland.

Millon’s father was a tailor by profession.

Millon attended college at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he studied physics, philosophy, and psychology. He obtained his bachelor’s degree from CUNY in 1949.

For graduate school, Millon attended the University of Connecticut, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the “authoritarian personality.” He received his PhD from Connecticut in 1954.

Millon obtained his first teaching job at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which would prove to have an enormous impact on his career.

Namely, during the 1950s Millon began to make regular visits to a nearby psychiatric hospital, Allentown State Hospital, where he closely observed the effects of a wide variety of mental illnesses at first hand. He eventually became a member of the hospital’s board of trustees, on which he served for 15 years.

Millon has stated that, at the beginning of his career, he found the field of mental health to be, in his words, “obscure, contradictory, confused, and in disarray.” Therefore, he resolved to spend his career in the search for objective, scientific means of measuring and diagnosing personality disorders, as well as the therapeutic means of mitigating the human suffering that flows from them.

The quarter-century extending from the mid-1960s through the end of the 1980s represented the highpoint of Millon’s intellectual activity, though he remained active well into old age.

In 1969, Millon published his landmark textbook, Modern Psychopathology: A Biosocial Approach to Maladaptive Learning and Functioning, the first of a large outpouring of writings from his pen. Shortly afterwards, he moved to University of Illinois at Chicago, where he remained for several years before ultimately settling at the University of Miami at Coral Gables, in 1977.

In addition, during his later years Millon held a visiting professorship at Harvard University, where he taught upon occasion.

In 1977, Millon published the original version of what would become one of his most celebrated contributions, the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI), now in its fourth version, published in 2015.

Millon was also heavily involved in two of the periodic updatings of the standard medical desk reference in his field, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), namely, the third edition (DSM-III) in 1980 and the fourth edition (DSM-IV) in 1994.

In 1988, Millon became the inaugural president of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. The following year, he became the founding editor of the Journal of Personality Disorders.  

Millon’s last full-time academic appointment was as Dean and Scientific Director of the Florida-based Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology, now known as the Millon Personality Group.

Over the course of his career, Millon published more than 30 books and 250 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.

Millon died in 2014 at the age of 85 in Greenville Township in upstate New York.

Notable Quotes

Note: The original sources of the following quotations attributed here to Theodore Millon are provided where known. If no specific source is mentioned, then the attributed quotation may be assumed to derive from or (perhaps via paraphrase) be inspired by Millon’s many academic and popular writings.

Abandonment

One response to feeling abandoned is to abandon yourself.

Personality Disorders in Modern Life (2000; 2nd ed., 2004).

Borderline Personality

Borderlines create the vicious circles they fear most. They become angry and drive the relationship to the breaking point, then switch to a posture of helplessness and contrition, beg for reconciliation. If both parties are equally enmeshed, chaos and conflict become the soul of the relationship.

Let’s take a look at the borderline personality. What we’re seeing when we describe an individual as evidencing a borderline personality, what we’re saying is that the individual is highly erratic in terms of how they feel about themselves, they’re unsure of who they are, what they want to be, what it is that makes their life worthwhile—and also their relationships with other people are extremely unpredictable and changeable. They feel one way this day toward their parents or toward their associates and completely differently another day.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

[W]e can ask ourselves Why has [borderline personality] become so commonplace? and I think the answer is the nature of our society in the past half-century in Western civilisations, the advanced complex but also highly changeable societies in which a multiplicity of different value systems and traditions co-exist. So that in contrast with the century and many centuries before where most people lived in tradition, routine, repetitive societies, they knew what they were supposed to believe, they knew what the nature of their job opportunities were, they knew what their mothers and fathers did and so on and so forth. You kind of didn’t have choices, opportunities, or complexities in your social world. This is the way you were supposed to be. But now what we’re finding in these complex highly changeable societies that young children don’t know who they are and where they’re going. They don’t know whether they should be nice or whether they should be nasty; whether should aspire or whether they should sit back and take it easy.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

Character

Personality can open doors, but only character can keep them open.

In the garden of humanity, the seeds of character are sown in the fertile soil of temperament.

Life is the canvas; personality is the brush; character is the painting.

Human Mind

The beauty of the human psyche lies in its infinite complexity, a labyrinth of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors waiting to be explored.

To understand the individual, one must delve into the depths of their unique psychological makeup, navigating the intricate pathways of the mind.

The human psyche is a vast ocean, with depths uncharted and currents unseen, revealing its mysteries to those brave enough to explore.

The human psyche is a labyrinth of shadows and light, where every corner holds the secrets of our being.

To understand the self is to embark on a lifelong odyssey, navigating the depths of consciousness and the shores of identity.

The Individual

Each of us is distinctive and unique. Each of us is an individual. We are encapsulated in our body form, we are separate from everyone else.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

The Individual and Humanity

In the mosaic of human nature, each individual contributes a piece, shaping the tapestry of our collective understanding.

In the symphony of existence, each individual contributes a unique melody, harmonizing with the cacophony of humanity.

To understand the soul of another is to journey into the heart of humanity, where empathy and understanding illuminate the path.

Millon on Millon

Re: his mother’s bipolar disorder

I suspect that my mother’s illnesses played a large role in trying to understand why she was as troubled and problematic as she was; and I could not really understand it fully, but that became a latent aspect of my psychological mind myself, and it wasn’t until it was brought out, stimulated by Professor Murphy, that it became a focus for a career rather than just personal life experiences.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

Re: working in Allentown State Hospital

When I awakened Sunday morning I began to wonder: Was I really a professor and a member of the board of trustees of the hospital? Or was I like some of the patients in the hospital, totally deluded into thinking “Oh, you must be a professor. Oh, you must be on the board of trustees—you really are, perhaps, a deluded paranoid.” I began to perspire. I looked around and I was saying to myself “I look like a patient, I’m wearing these terrible clothes, maybe I really am? No, no, I’m really not.” I didn’t know what I was.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

The entire experience of working at the hospital—and I was involved in a lot of research studies at the hospital as well—but the personal contact with patients, not just seeing them as numbers of names or in case presentations, but actually walking around the hospital wards and sitting down and talking to patients as person to person, not a member of the board, nothing very special—that kind of direct contact with them, not as a therapist and not as an objective research scientist but on a person to person basis—I have a feeling that I learned more about the real human qualities of patients. I began to really get a feeling of what it was like to experience the kinds of experiences they had, which ran the gamut from deep depression and gloom to manic excitement and confusion in their thought processes and the like. But the key thing that came through all the way and constantly—these are real people, these were not in quotes “crazies” and so on and so forth.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

Narcissism

Narcissists have a tough job because perfection is viewed as either all or nothing: If you are not perfect, you are imperfect, and if you are imperfect, you are nothing.

Personality Disorders in Modern Life (2000; 2nd ed., 2004).

Nature and Nurture

To comprehend the individual, one must first understand the intricate dance between nature and nurture.

In the gallery of human expression, each personality is a masterpiece, crafted with the brushstrokes of nature and nurture.

Personality

[Personality] is the composite elements that make the person the unique individual the individual is. It’s not a facet or a component or a domain or one aspect of the whole person, but each of us is a unique composite composed of biological tendencies, life experiences, and the like. It’s the uniqueness of the individual.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

Understanding the layers of personality is akin to peeling an onion—each layer reveals a deeper truth.

Every person is a novel waiting to be read, their personality a story woven from the threads of experience and temperament.

Personality is the lens through which we perceive the world, coloring our experiences and shaping our interactions with others.

Within the tapestry of human personality lies the intricate weave of our desires, fears, and aspirations.

Personality is the canvas upon which life paints its masterpiece, each stroke a reflection of our inner world.

Personality is the sculptor of our destiny, chiseling our character from the raw material of experience.

Personality is the prism through which we refract reality, shaping our perceptions and coloring our world.

Personalities are like impressionistic paintings. At a distance, each person is ‘all of a piece’; up close, each is a bewildering complexity of moods, cognitions, and motives.

Disorders of Personality: DSM-IV and Beyond, with Roger Dale Davis (1996; 2nd edition, 2004).

Psychopathologies across Cultures

There are commonalities that exist in all cultures. What is poorly termed “schizophrenia” seems to be universal throughout culture and over time. On the other hand, there are certain styles of thinking and behaving—certainly, personalities—that are much more characteristic of a particular culture or a particular time.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

What has happened also in, again, the more sophisticated societies – it is quite true now that people are able to achieve heights that only were achieved financially, status-wise and otherwise, by kings and queens and princes and so on in earlier centuries. Ordinary folk can now become very wealthy, ordinary folk are able to live like kings and queens were centuries ago. The sense of self as being special and unique is something that’s entirely new, it doesn’t show up in many societies yet. In fact when discussions occur at international conferences certain psychiatrists and psychologists from other societies say we don’t see narcissists, Japan doesn’t have many narcissistic personalities. India has very few but they are beginning to emerge in India more and more so. In the United States, in New York, in Chicago and Los Angeles we see many individuals who have succeeded far beyond their wildest dreams and they tend to think of themselves as deserving special attention. Things that only kings and princes and queens were able to assert centuries ago.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

Psychopathology as a Science

[W]e in our profession are still back in the scarlet fever, measles and chickenpox era, we still describe the nature of the problems that patients deal with in terms of depression, anxiety, but these are just this overt elements that crop up on the surface. They are not really what’s going on. To understand that we have to look deeper. And among the things that we are beginning to understand is that the whole person really shows a vulnerability to becoming depressed, so that as we wish to understand depression we begin to recognise that a borderline personality gets depressed for different reasons than an anti-social personality, or an avoidant personality, or a paranoid personality. And they manifest it and ought to be treated differently, even though both of them are depressed, because their personalities differ.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

So, for example, the behaviourists focused their attention on the actions or the behaviour of individuals and they began to say ‘The way to really understand patients is to see what they do’. Not what they think, not what they feel but what they do, that is their actions, their behaviour. On the other hand there were the psychoanalysts and their approach was really very different; they were not interested in behaviour but rather in the unconscious, that is, that which is operating within the mind, but below one’s conscious awareness, that influences one’s behaviour. And so those two schools of thought were very dominant approaches mostly in the mid phases of the 20th century. And so there are a multitude of different approaches and one can trace the early history of these approaches from a very fascinating perspective of – what were people thinking back in the time of the early Greeks? What was Hippocrates thinking about in the 4th century BC.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

[T]he problem, you know, broadly speaking, can be divided into diagnostic understanding—What is it that patients are experiencing, suffering, what is problematic about them? and how we might group them and understand them better. And secondly, therapeutic or treatment techniques—How shall we approach patients? Both areas were rather poorly developed from a scientific and philosophical point of view and that ultimately led to an interest on my part in understanding the history of where we came from to believe which kinds of techniques we should use for treatment, or how we should go about diagnosing patients.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

I think we understand things more, we have better ways for analysing our understanding and which features and characteristics of human behaviour… We have the technology now to understand many things that we were not able to understand or perceive and to scientifically objectify, if you will. But whether or not we can use that successfully, whether we can counteract the negative characteristics of human behaviour is still a task that lies before us and hopefully, from my point of view, we’ll continue to focus our attention on what we can do to bring out the best of individuals, to prevent the emergence of negative characteristics and traits and you know, we have still a way to go but I think the possibilities lie there and we have moved forward in that direction. While unfortunately simultaneously in many parts of the world we seem to be regressing.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

Psychopharmacology

I was very much involved in the early studies of psycho-pharmaceuticals and was engaged in the kinds of research that was done in the first decade or so with them. And they were extremely useful and very effective. And there’s no doubt that pharmaceuticals change the neurochemistry of patients very often in a positive and constructive way. But there are very serious problems with it. We are not really able to deal with problems in the long term, not being able to make modifications in their whole life style because by using psycho-pharmaceutical methods we are just modifying the symptoms, we’re not really helping the person change their approach to life, their potentials for becoming richer and more developed human beings and so on and so forth. It’s only one step, it happens to be a very expedient step, it’s a very successful step from the economics of the drug industry, but it is overused and more people expect of it than it really can produce.

Interview with Gretchen Miller, “All in the Mind,” Listen, ABC Radio National (Australia), October 28, 2005.

Schizophrenia

Neither responding to praise nor criticism, the social dynamics typically held to most of us as important are merely incidental to schizoids.

Personality Disorders in Modern Life (2000; 2nd ed., 2004).

Temperament

Temperament is closely related to mood but best refers to the sum total of biological constraints on personality.

Personality Disorders in Modern Life (2000; 2nd ed., 2004).