Borderline personality

[joanna bujes]

At 03:49 PM 03/06/2002 -0500, Carrol wrote:
>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.

Oooh! I'm really confused now. I have a dim memory of a definition of 
borderline personality I encountered in a book by Fenichel and what I 
remember is that it indicates illness that is more than neurotic but less 
then psychotic....thus making it more difficult to treat. So, Fenichel 
didn't really address the issue of content but of severity/intensity as a 
definitional guide. Does this accord with anything you know?

Joanna