[General principles in psychotherapy of personality disorders]

S2 guidelines for diagnostics and treatment of personality disorders have been developed under the umbrella of the AWMF Germany. Following the current trend to manualized axis I treatment programs, within the recent years specific treatment programs have also been developed for some personality disorders like borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder and avoidant personality disorder. The superiority of these treatment programs compared to unspecific approaches is meanwhile proven on a robust empirical basis. The S2 guidelines task force extracted the principles of these manualized treatment programs to provide the framework for a general clinically oriented concept for the treatment of personality disorders. The intention was to develop a concept which gets beyond the school oriented therapeutic approaches in order to provide the platform for further developments of general and specific treatments for personality disorders.