Borderline Personality Disorder: a Lacanian Perspective

The diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder has taken its place in American psychoanalysis as a personality structure the significance of which has equaled and even eclipsed the traditional categories of neurosis and psychosis. Yet the borderline diagnosis has been largely rejected by followers of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In this study, Dr. Liliana Rusansky Drob examines the concept of borderline personality from the perspective of Lacan, contrasting a Lacanian approach to diagnosing and treating such severely disturbed patients with that of the most prominent expositor of the borderline diagnosis, Otto Kernberg. Dr. Drob provides an in-depth analysis of a paradigm case of borderline personality from each of these perspectives. She places these theorists in dialog with one another and demonstrates how a patient who clearly meets standard borderline criteria can be conceptualized, diagnosed, and treated without recourse to the borderline concept, and how an analysis of the Oedipal vicissitudes and unconscious desire of the patient can be highly effective in promoting structural change and personal growth.