Personal Identity and Narrativity in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Phenomenological Reconfiguration.

Borderline personality disorder involves a fragmentation of narrative identity, a widely shared view that has been challenged by alternative perspectives emphasizing agency. This article contributes to that debate using a phenomenological approach. It reviews the narrative interpretation, justifies a stratified model of the self based on phenomenology, and draws on László Tengelyi's three layers of self—self-institution, self-formation, and minimal self—to integrate competing concepts from Fuchs, Schmidt, Gold, Kyratsous, and Zahavi. The final section reconfigures the identity-related experiences and manifestations of BPD through this layered phenomenological lens.

Study at a glance

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.