Abstract
Although it is generally accepted that only certain categories of mental disease, precisely defined in the criminal code, warrant criminal insanity or severely limited sanity, many lawyers and psychiatrists are beginning to voice concern that the negative contribution of certain types of extreme personality disorder to criminal offence is insufficiently appreciated. The authors also point out that every personality should be viewed as a continuum of varying stability and that the clinical manifestations of situational decompensation of allegedly stable personality mechanisms may at times approach the borderline or even psychotic level. This implies the need to verify the existing approach of forensic psychiatry to persons suffering from personality disorders in whom particular configurations of extremely traumatic psychological and situational factors may lead to criminogenicdecompensation.