borderline personality

[Chris Burford]

At 06/03/02 16:29 -0500, you wrote:
>At 01:07 PM 3/6/02 -0800, Alec Ramsdell wrote:
>>Carrol Cox wrote:
>>
>> > First -- the diagnosis is a suspect one;
>>
>>I've heard the same, that it's a dubious
>>classification.  As such, it would be a case of the
>>analyst gaving birth to a new illness as a way of
>>treating his own anxieties of diagnosis.  Also, why
>>would it be endemic to the *bourgeois* ego--couldn't
>>working class folk suffer from it as well.
>
>
>I wish I could remember where I read the same. It was a very good 
>debunking of BPD which effectively showed that _everyone_ is BPD in the 
>same way that _everyone_ is an addict to AA "recruiters" (see, _Becoming 
>An Alcoholic, Rudy) or _everyone_ is a co-dependent or enabler in Al-anon 
>(see feminist critiques of those progs).

A Google search gives a range of good contributions on BPD.

One of the problems of a diagnostic concept of "personality disorders" is 
that it appears to try to locate within the individual as almost a disease 
what is better discussed as a problem of *inter* personal relations. That 
is less judgemental and blends with ordinary expeience that we all have 
situations or people which we find difficult to handle.

In a loose way I think the concept of personality disorders is linked with 
capitalist ideology: the fiction that we are all atomised indiduals coming 
together to buy or sell our labour power or the products of labour. Someone 
with a "personality disorder" is of inferior quality, but might in a larger 
social setting, play a pivotal social role, such as president of the USA or 
member of the British Royal Family, to take just two examples.

Generally the disease model is more problematic in mental health than the 
syndrome or symptom model.

Chris Burford