The Borderline Experience
For those of you who are unfamiliar with me and my condition, I am afflicted with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). There are many dynamics behind the condition to assess. This blog-post will walk you through the condition.
Note how within this blogpost, I will relate to the borderline condition as the borderline experience. This is to detach the borderline experience from the confines of the medical gaze. There are several reasons behind doing so. For the borderline, the medical gaze can be oppressive as there is often a gendered bias behind it. This is through the perceptions of socialised femininity.
Mental illness as representation is an important analysis to consider. The concept of borderline personality disorder is a contested enigma due to the gendered assessments behind the borderline experience. Representative can be reductive, due to the discrepancy between representation and presentation of the borderline experience. Representation can be affirming, but presentation can have reductive qualities.
Within disability studies, or ‘Crip theory’, diagnosis can be used as a mode of representation but also other means of representation through the female experience. Margaret Price (2015) refers to the phenomenon of counter-diagnosis within the borderline condition of queering your diagnosis and queering the borderline diagnosis. When we queer our diagnosis we thus do not have to think about our diagnosis in medical terms because the medical diagnosis thus becomes irrelevant. This is a process of trying to destabilise the very foundations the diagnosis is founded upon.
This leads us on to the topic of diffraction. This concept arises from the concept of diffraction within physics. In classic physics diffraction occurs when waves are altered by an obstacle. We can apply this analogy to the case of the borderline experience. Life can be constructed as a situation of diffractive patterns, each pattern mitigated by environmental triggers. For the borderline this can be trauma in childhood, leading to self-injury in adult life. Much like in physics, the diffractive mode can transpire into the very fabric of existence and life as we know it. The diffractive mode can become conceptualised as infinite but in a non-linear, non-consecutive fashion. It is occurring without being.
These concepts are key and vital within Crip study due to the nature of the borderline experience. Society is constructed in a normative manner to work against the disabled, so borderlines have to redirect their inner compass to suit the agendas of the normative world in which we inhabit.
Normative worldviews and values can often pose problematic conundrums for the borderline. For example, many may wonder whether this is a question of personality types within a personality disorder. The borderline condition often puts emphasis on introvert versus extrovert types. Cain (2012) argues that borderlines are often empathetic due to their sensitive condition. With borderlines this highly empathetic trait means that their social boundaries are often thinner. With this they tend to have stronger consciences as borderlines tend to focus on problems, often deemed too heavy or emotive by others.
Taking all of these factors and variables into account, the borderline experience is thus a temporal lobe within the psyche of the social consciousness and imagining. This can thus lead to a decline within the borderline concept. Becker (1997) notes that borderline can be defined as a concept based on psychoanalysis, but this concept is in decline.
Part of the reason behind the decline in the borderline concept is due to the misnaming of the condition. Borderline personality disorder has become somewhat of a misnomer, often being referred to as borderline pyschostructural organisation, borderline affective disorder or borderline schizophrenia. Each use of these terms has a unique historical development but is also rife with ambiguities, unresolved questions inconsistencies and limitations. Despite the conceptual overlap between them, Becker notes that ‘because they meanings lie on different planes of discourse reflecting different notions of illness and etiology, they are totally unreconcilable’ (Arneson, 1985 in Becker, 1997, p.50). Thus, there is a questionable nature to the space in which the borderline experience occupies. Many theorists propose that the development of the borderline personality structure is a failure to successfully negotiate the early separation or individuation phase of childhood. However, this theory is slowly beginning to be abandoned as there is little factual; evidence to support it. Kroll notes it is a ‘felicitous theory that assists the conduct of therapy…but is untested, improbable in its breadth’ (Kroll, 1993 in Becker, 1997 p.51).
Thus, when assessing the borderline condition, a new direction needs to be taken; a direction in which it is not gendered or adhere to normative experiences. Only then can the borderline experience be fully understood.