Getting rejected by academic journals does not usually bother me. But when it happens to my best work, which supports the idea that disorders of ‘‘personality’’ are disorders of ‘‘relating’’, rejection hits harder because the reviewer comments are much, much harsher themselves.

For instance, the following paper was rejected by a top journal because only one reviewer vehemently opposed it by saying that ‘‘they don’t see the point of the analysis’’. Not that the analysis is wrong. Not that the analysis could be improved. But that they fail to see the point of the analysis entirely.

In other words, the reviewer did not see the point of running an analysis that could, at least in principle, falsify the idea of personality pathology. Or in other, other words: the reviewer did not want their favourite idea to be genuinely challenged (since if they did, they could at least suggest a major revision and ask for 1,000 sensitivity analyses to make sure all effects were robust; and I would have gladly complied because I am more interested in truth than academic politics).

But in any case, all that to say that it will be extremely hard to get my PhD work published because it challenges everything that everyone thinks about PD. In the meantime, then, my papers will live online as preprints until some brave editor / reviewer decides to give them a genuine chance to be published: