The developmental roots of borderline personality disorder (BPD)

Kamis, 14 Januari 2010

Underpinning our approach is the assumption that understanding borderline personality disorder (BPD) depends on an understanding of normal human development. In thinking about self-development, rather than focusing on the content of the mental representation of self, which has been the focus of psychological investigation for much of the century (for a review see Harter 1999), we are instead concerned with the process that allows the representation of self to come into being: that is, the evolution of the ‘self as agent’. The development of the self as agent (for convenience often referred to here as the ‘agentive self’) has historically been a neglected topic, because of the dominance of the Cartesian assumption that the agentive self emerges automatically from the sensation of the mental activity of the self (‘I think therefore I am’).

The influence of Cartesian doctrine has encouraged the belief that the conscious apprehension of our mind states through introspection is a basic, direct, and probably pre-wired mental capacity, leading to the conviction that knowledge of the self as a mental agent (as a ‘doer’ of things and a ‘thinker’ of thoughts) is an innate-given rather than a developing or constructed capacity.

If we understand the acquisition of knowledge of the self as a mental agent to be the result of a developmental process, which can go wrong in certain circumstances, we can gain a new perspective on the origins of BPD. In order to gain this new perspective, we must first go back to consider our earliest days, reviewing self-development in the context of the individual’s early attachment relationships.