There was definitely a previous thread but I can't find it for some reason..
For a nice overview on all different theories of personality (from freud, jung adler etc right to more contemporary theories like those of cloninger, mcadams, mischel, costa & mcrae etc) I would recommend
Personality, Individual Differences, and Intelligence by Maltby, Day, and Macaskill. It's an undergrad psychology textbook but very easy to read and well written briefly surveying the whole field of personality in historical context.
Otherwise I recommend my residents read the following 4 papers:
Ainsworth MS, Bowlby J.
An ethological approach to personality development. Am Psychologist 46:333-341
McAdams DP.
What do we know when we know a person? J Personality 1995;
63:365-396
McCrae RR, John OP.
An introduction to the five-factor model and its applications. J Pers 1992;
60:175-215
Mischel W.
Toward an integrative science of the person. Annu Rev Psychol 2004;
55:1-22
On the topics of personality disorders, this paper is the one I recommend all psychiatry residents read:
Fonagy P.
Attachment and Borderline Personality Disorder. J Am Psychoanal Assoc 2000;
48:1129-1146
total hijack - but are there any books about people with schizotypal or schizoid PD? i find the usmle questions stems so interesting...what are these people like?
The schizoid personality has gone out of favor now we label people with autistic spectrum instead, however the schizoid personality as an antecedent to "schizophrenia" was best described by R.D. Laing in
The Divided Self. This is one of the most important texts in 20th century psychiatry and it's quite short and worth a read. Some psychiatrists have argued that medical students and junior residents should not read it until later in their training, but in its day it attracted a whole generation of students into the profession.
Gordon Claridge is the main researcher on the topic of schizotypy (particularly its relationship with creativity) and you may want to look up his work. It is one of the better studied "personality disorders" though it was originally popularized to expand out the "schizophrenia" phenotype because so few people in the families of schizophrenics had the illness it for genetic/family studies. Though Kraepelin first described the concept.
Importantly in European Psychiatry personality disorders have always existed on Axis I. the belief was that temperament was inherited and mental disorder was typically the result of some sort of attack/stressor on a vulnerable personality