The study indicates that both MBT and supportive treatment are highly effective in treating BPD when conducted by a well-trained and experienced psychodynamic staff in a well-organized clinic.

Disturbed identity is one of the defining characteristics of Borderline Personality Disorder manifested in a broad spectrum of dysfunctions related to the self, including disturbances in meaning-generating self-narratives. Autobiographical memories are memories of personal events that provide crucial building-blocks in our construction of a life-story, self-concept, and a meaning-generating narrative identity. The cultural life script represents culturally shared expectations as to the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course within a given culture. It is used to organize one's autobiographical memories. Here, 17 BPD-patients, 14 OCD-patients, and 23 non-clinical controls generated three important autobiographical memories and their conceptions of the cultural life script. BPD-patients reported substantially more negative memories, fewer of their memories were of prototypical life script events, their memory narratives were less coherent and more disoriented, and the overall typicality of their life scripts was lower as compared with the other two groups.

No abstract

Traditionally, personal identity is considered to be important for psychological health and adaptive functioning. Identity diffusion and other more severe forms of disturbance associated with personal identity are regarded as being essential parts of the borderline personality disorder. Moreover, disturbances in identity are seen as being part of the dynamic background for many of the symptoms and maladaptive behaviors found in borderline patients. It is argued, that the development of personal identity is intimately related to, and indeed dependent on, elements of modern culture, with significant cultural changes having affected the conditions under which human identity develops. Therefore, the identity diffusion seen in patients with borderline disorders must be understood in relation to not only the individual patient's personal history and inner structures but also contemporary late modern culture and social organization.