The borderline spectrum and psychoanalytic perspectives

Meissner, W. W.

doi:10.1080/07351698809533727

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Yet in the case of the borderline the stability of the referent was illusory, repeatedly asserted, but never established. Clinicians were never in agreement on to what the term -or terms, for whatever it was, it went under a number of different rubrics, chief among them borderline personality organization (Kernberg 1967) and borderline personality disorder (APA 1980) -referred, whether to a type of patient, a state, a syndrome (e.g., Masterson and Rinsley 1975), a spectrum (Meissner 1988), a stable form of personality organization (Kernberg 1975), or to cases that fell at the margins of psychosis (Gunderson and Singer 1975;Leichtman 1989, 230). 4 Was borderline a noun or adjective (Akiskal et al 1985;Weinshel 1988), a gobetween (Grotstein 1983) or a distinct entity?…”

Section: History From the Insidementioning

confidence: 99%

Borderline Histories: Psychoanalysis Inside and Out

Lunbeck

2006

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ArgumentSociologists and historians have long favored externalist over internalist accounts of practices in the clinical disciplines. This has been particularly true in the case of the so-called new patient or borderline personality, which a range of commentators have located in culturally resonant narratives of decline. I argue here that these narratives, while pleasing, do not hold up as history; most problematic is their assumption that the appearance of the borderline portends the emergence of altogether novel forms of modal personhood. Internalist accounts of the category's consolidation are equally problematic in asserting a coherence and a stable referent that repeatedly proves elusive. In the end, I suggest that a complex account of disciplinary practice that attends to knowledge production in the clinical encounter supports the conclusion that the new patient was new to psychoanalysis. Whether or not he was altogether new cannot be established, undermining the critics' certitude and prophecies of decline.

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Section: History From the Insidementioning

confidence: 99%