Borderline Personality Disorder, Lived Space, and the Stimmung

Abstract

Most articles and theories about borderline personality disorder (BPD), either in the psychoanalytical field or the cognitivist one, explicitly or implicitly inscribe themselves in a topographical framework that either carry a fundamental representational a priori or give prominence to causal explanations. Less is written about the phenomenological everyday life-world of borderline people. This article aims to contribute to the description of such a world. Drawing upon clinical sequences that give prominence to the first-person perspective, we will analyse the experience of some typical “symptoms” of BPD in a phenomenological and topological way. We will be led to conclude that the borderline stimmung seems to display the following characteristics: a pervading immediacy of lived experience, a territorialization that tends towards ubiquity, a certain difficulty to deal with the unity and difference poles, a quite horizontal concern with ecstasy and elation, and a waning of reflexivity in the lived space.