borderline personality

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Mar 6 12:16:04 PST 2002


joanna bujes wrote:
>
> At 01:37 PM 03/06/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> >The psychoanalytic literature on Borderline Personality is very interesting,
> >and calls for a political interpretation, mostly because it captures the
> >details of advanced degeneration of the bourgeois ego.

First -- the diagnosis is a suspect one; I once asked my therapist about it, and she passed on the joke that "BPD" was a psychiatrist's way of saying "Fuck You" to the patient. Another use of it a psychiatrist's excuse for unsuccessful treatment of Depression -- it's not depression but BPD. I have known one person diagnosed with it and one person who seemed to me to fit the diagnosis. Whether the _cause_ was political or not I do not know (I suspect _all_ causal_ explanations of psychiatric disorders: we just don't know). But it can certainly have political _effects_: it (or the symptoms so identified) has the effect of making the person quite incapable of placing blame on structures rather than individuals. Whenever you see someone obsessed with identifying someone as evil or the source of evil, you can suspect BPD. BPD (or whatever as yet unidentified syndrome(s) or illness(s) it is the current name for) is a very sad condition.

Carrol



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