The emergence of borderline personality disorder: a behavioral view

Abstract

At the end of the past century, borderline personality disorder was established as an important category in psychopathology. A specific historical context made its emergence possible within psychoanalysis. In a few decades, it transformed from an opaque and questionable concept at the fringes of psychodynamic theory, into a respectable diagnosis that, sustained by DSM authority, is applied to an important percentage of the psychiatric population. A behavioral therapy was empirically validated as the treatment of choice for this disorder. Considering that the meaning of a term is determined by the history of the verbal community that uses it, we went back to the practices of knowledge production of the scientists of the epoch. This made it possible to understand the borderline concept as a product of social contexts that engendered changes in clinical theory. We examine these changes in two senses. First, we look at the emergence of the diagnostic concept in the respective literatures of psychoanalysis and of psychiatry. Second, we try to understand the salience of the borderline personality pattern as the result of the interpersonal contexts of the modern age. We suggest that this analysis is necessary to make sense of the concept within the behavioral view.

Keywords: borderline personality disorder; historical analysis; psychopathology.