Chris Burford's comment is helpful --
"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 judgmental and blends with ordinary experience that we all have situations or people which we find difficult to handle."
Actually, object relations theory does try to situate personality theory in interpersonal relations. "Object" here, rather confusingly, means "object of cathexis," which is an interpersonal concept. (The terminology of ORT is more than usually confusing. Melanie Klein, who is a very fine theorist, is even more so.)
Michael Pollak touches on a bit of the historical side of the concept of borderline personality --
"I believe the heyday of the borderline personality idea was the late 70s. As I remember it, the idea always had most of its success as a political diagnosis. It was essentially the left way of condemning the Me Decade.
The basic argument was that contemporary bureaucratic-consumerist society had led to a new kind of weaker and more infantile (aka "pre-oedipal") personality type, where the capitalism of small farmers and entrepreneurs and stable two-parent families had previously given rise to autonomous (aka "oedipal") individuals. Proponents said that the old setup gave rise to sharply defined oedipal crises and clear resolutions of same, which resulted in a personality with strong oepidal structures, where the new situation was more amorphous on all fronts, and led to a lack of crisis, a lack of resolution and a weakly structured personality. (And that this was a bad thing, where just a few years previously, softening and loosening up had been considered virtues when it came to the self. Rigid structures and strong boundaries were considered bad things for the self to have in the late 60s. They led to inability to show affection, a proneness to heart attacks and a rage to make Strangelovian war.) I think the gist of the preoedipal argument was that the preoedipal personality had a difficult time formulating its desires, and such inarticulate desires were difficult to satisfy and easy to manipulate. Preoedipal types were supposed to be inherently dependant and frustrated, a lot like infants they were modelled on."
Except that Michael makes it seem like a trend in a decade or two and no more. To be sure, he is right that the picture he presents was what you saw in popular magazines, etc., and the media went on to other things. But borderline personality is still a very practical and widely used concept because it accounts for a lot of what one encounters in clinical work, and generally suggests reasonably effective ways to address everyday problems.
At the same time, however, though the pop understanding of historical changes in ego functioning was rather superficial, it still was not so far off. Read Kernberg's BORDERLINE CONDITIONS AND PATHOLOGICAL NARCISSISM (The two things, by the way, are not the same, despite Lasch, and Kernberg, who is a very precise wriiter, makes an effort to distinguish them.) and you can see the reifications of a consumer society at work. Take a look back at Adorno's delightful essay THE STARS DOWN TO EARTH, an analysis of an astrology column in the Los Angeles Times, and you find him adapting Fenichel's concept of biphasic personality to an understanding of a mass psychological phenomenon, in a way that is clearly consistent withsome of Kernberg's concepts of borderline personality as an unintegrated ego with a predominance of primitive -- and hence pre-oedipal -- defenses like splitting, projection and projective identification.
It is not particularly easy to immediately transfer any one of these concepts to use in understanding political phenomena, but the theory in general is very useful in understanding the pre-conscious and unconscious aspects of a whole range of cultural and political problems the left faces. In particular, the politics of gender, the derivative problems the religious right, and the more issue problem of faith pose for us lend themselves to this kind of understanding. In fact, the left's failure to grab ahold of events like the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and to take the offensive against the reactionary churches is symptomatic of the psychological superficiality of the analysis we bring to much of American politics.
An example: the notion that we just have to talk people into understanding their "real interests" and that they should blame the large forces in society and not the ones they usually hold responsible for their oppression. This is the kind of thinking that leads to leftists holding didactic discussions with members of "the white working class" about how really the corporations are to blame, not the Blacks down the block or in the workplace, etc.
Now, of course, reason is a beautiful thing and we know reason and truth are with us and not with the class enemy. But the obstacles to mass understanding of our wisdom are not just that people are misinformed. The desire to submit, for example, is not always conscious and not so easy to rationally oppose.
For this reason, Carrol's criticism of psychotherapy is far off the mark --
") has the effect of making
>the person quite incapable of placing blame on structures rather than
>individuals."
This is by no means always true, even in the case of individual therapy. But the usefulness of contemporary psychoanalytic theory for left strategic thinking goes far beyond therapy. For example, there have been useful appropriations of object relations theory, as in Nancy Chodorow, Lynn Chancer, and Jessica Benjamin's work. These go beyond the limited understanding of gender of the original Frankfurt School with its implicit nostalgia for the bourgeois family and bourgeois marriage that Yoshie very properly criticized.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema