The lived body in borderline personality disorder: self-construction from distorted intersubjectivity and narrative identity.

Abstract

The narrative of identity is an activity that gets its feedback by experiences held along one’s life, and its contents change according to the interactions that one may have. These interactions are oriented to the self, the other, and the world. The result of this activity leads to a lived body that endows itself of particular meanings. It may seem, nevertheless, that when there is a current psychopathology the agency to one’s self-construction becomes a brittle point delegated to the another. A key point in this construction, besides the interpretation of the contents of the world, is the intersubjective interaction as well as the reflection of experience. Self-consciousness would not exist without the gaze and the body of the alterity. However, is the presence of the other necessary? Is it possible to develop a psychopathology from the interaction with the other? From this context, the objective of the present paper is to explore the limits that alterity presupposes for the narrative identity in the case of Borderline Personality Disorder. 

Keywords: Psychopathology, intersubjectivity, narrative identity, phenomenology, borderline personality disorder.