The Psychoanalytic Understanding of Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders: Advances in Developmental Theory

I have reviewed and supported the proposition that theory building in psychoanalysis requires the careful correlation and meaningful interpenetration of the data and hypotheses from both the reconstructive and direct observational approaches. In illustration of this premise, I postulated that failure to achieve age-adequate self-regulation and ego autonomy during the rapprochement subphase of the separation-individuation process contributes crucially to the pathogenesis of

narcissistic and borderline disorders. I have also described the rapprochement subphase of the separation-individuation process and attempted to draw some correlations between it and the psychological formations characteristic of narcissistic personality disorders. Clinical material from the analyses of a three-year-old girl and an eighteen-year-old girl was employed to demonstrate the genetic origin of such pathology and to illustrate some facets of analytic process in the treatment of a narcissistic personality disorder. Lastly, I noted and supported the controversial concepts of structure formation as a result of psychoanalytic treatment, and of analytic process as being both therapeutic and developmental. In these attempts, I have been viewing mostly familiar concepts and clinical experience mainly from the perspective provided by advances in the psychoanalytic theory of early psychic development.