What is wrong with Dwight Schrute?

Yalım
5 min readMar 6, 2023

There are 10 Personality Disorders in DSM-5 (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition). I decided to write about them and explain these personality disorders with some examples from Pop-Culture.

So… Today’s example is Dwight Schrute (Dwight Kurt Schrute III) from “The Office”. I’ll try to keep it simple and clear. I’m not going to write every weird thing he said or did. That would make me write a super-long post.

Diagnostic: Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)

Source:

1.Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) is characterized by a pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and control at the expense of flexibility, and openness.

I believe only from this paragraph, we can say it is a great match. Since the first season, we witness Dwight’s hunger for promotion and control over his “inferior” colleagues.

Well, his boss doesn’t want to promote him to “Assistant Regional Manager” (ARM) but since he’s aware of how Dwight’s obsessed with superiority and control, he’s promoted to “Assistant to the Regional Manager”. But of course, he acts as if he’s the ARM, and tries to dominate others or boss them around. He ends up getting corrected instead.

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Yalım

Psychology and psychoanalysis graduate. Interests: psychology, psychoanalysis, philosopy, politics, litterature, history, shitposting, music, games @Berlin