Personal Identity and Narrativity in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Phenomenological Reconfiguration.
Cassandre Bois, István Fazakas, Juliette Salles, Tudi Gozé
Psychopathology January 1, 2023 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1159/000526222 via PubMed
Summary
Borderline personality disorder involves fragmentation of identity, affect, and relationships. The concept of narrative self has been used to explain identity disturbances, but debates persist. This article contributes a phenomenological stratification of the self, drawing on László Tengelyi's three layers: self-institution, self-formation, and minimal self. It integrates competing views from Fuchs, Gold, Kyratsous, and Schmidt, and reconfigures identity-related experiences in BPD.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | A phenomenological stratification of the self into three layers—self-institution, self-formation, and minimal self—can integrate competing narrative and agential accounts of identity fragmentation in borderline personality disorder. |
Abstract
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a complex condition marked by heterogeneity. People with BPD have a profusion of symptoms spread across various levels of lived experience, such as identity, affectivity, and interpersonal relationships. Researchers and clinicians have often resorted to the structuring concept of Self to organize the fragmentation of their experience at the identity level. Notably, using the concept of the narrative self, Fuchs proposed to interpret BPD as a fragmentation of narrative identity. This interpretation of BPD, widely shared, has been challenged by Gold and Kyratsous, who have proposed a complementary understanding of the self through the idea of agency, and to which Schmidt and Fuchs in turn have countered. This article proposes to contribute to this discussion from a phenomenological perspective. First, we will briefly review the discussions around narrative interpretation of BPD. From the problems left unresolved by the discussion, we will then justify the necessity to proceed with a stratification of the self from a phenomenology method. Third, from the thought of the Hungarian phenomenologist László Tengelyi, we will continue with an archaeology of the self, in three layers - self-institution, self-formation, and minimal self - integrating Schmidt and Fuchs' concepts of self, in addition to those of Gold and Kyratsous, but also, to a lesser extent, those of Dan Zahavi. Finally, we will proceed with a phenomenological reconfiguration of the experiences and manifestations associated with the identity axis of BPD.