Planning Review initiates with this article on voluntary simplicity a series prepared by Stanford Research Institute's research staff. The articles will address emerging trends in economics, technology, and society that need to be considered by practicing planners. The new series will be coordinated by Riggs Monfort, Director of Program Development for SRI's Business Intelligence Program, and a Contributing Editor for Planning Review.
Mankind's social and psychological evolution require changing attitudes and behavior to maintain a harmony with the world, society, and his own self. Loss of immediacy with the world, power over it, and the increasing capacity for individuality pose special problems for the accomplishment of such harmony. How this is recognized, understood, and dealt with is a task undertaken through psychoanalysis, myth, philosophy, and literature. Various examples are given to show that the constancy of the basic truths about the nature of being human leads to a resonance among the diverse approaches and across the span of millennia and cultures.
To try to encompass what is meant by borderline with parameters that are too delineating can lead to conceptual difficulties and confusion for several reasons: The human psyche is too complex and probably has too much of the quality of a gestalt to be understood adequately by dichotomizing thinking; an individual does not experience himself as operating in discrete units, but as a unified whole; and the most characteristic manifest quality of the borderline picture is its tendency toward a chaotic functioning that somehow always spills over any defining boundaries which are set up to attain conceptual containment. If we then accept our limitations on the precision and order with which we can comprehend it, the understanding of borderline might be supplemented by seeing it in terms of the subjective experience of an integrated self. This offers a more holistic approach that tends not to be so subject to objectifying compartmentalization. It is more in tune with the subjective experiencing a person has of that which defines and moves him in the world. And it offers a referent axis along which the distance one has traveled in the borderline direction might be gleaned. Finally, the relationship of the borderline diagnosis to character disorder might be looked this way: The diagnosis does not refer to a particular character disorder or to a group of disorders. It emerges in all character pathology to the degree that the experiencing of an integrated and whole sense of self, which is at the heart of character structure, is diminished.
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