Borderline: A Diagnostic Straitjacket?*1

Women have been plagued by a history of being read and misread by the male gaze, invisible under the rubric of an enigmatic collective mystery behind which the individual disappeared. Paternalistic structures in some ways protected her but at the price of her ability to define herself and her values. As we look back over the last half century of struggle against discrimination and unfair practices, we can locate pivotal milestones, such as the incorporation of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in the United States in 1967. By 1968, local groups were forming and the second feminist wave had been launched. Women were fighting for equal rights, abortion rights, and pay equality; rights that today remain under question in spite of all the effort invested over the past 50 years.

I would like to contextualize my discussion of the term borderline within the framework of a psychiatric - and psychoanalytic - system that must become ‘part of the terrain to be analyzed, rather than the medium through which analysis is conducted’ (Angel, 2012: 5). Notably, Borderline Personality Disorder was not even formally recognized within the DSM system until 1980. Until then, the term was used to refer to an ostensible borderline between psychosis and neurosis or to individuals who were presumed to have an underlying psychotic vulnerability that had not yet surfaced (Silk, 2002). In 1967, Kernberg described a personality organization marking characteristics linked to unstable or impaired object relations. At the same time, Grinker (1968) was developing a model specifically characterized as a personality disorder.

From the vantage point of our current day, we can contextualize the term borderline in relation to the psychoanalytic demarcation of a line between the neurotic and psychotic levels of functioning. That stance alerts us to the complexity of working with someone with such intense affective instability that cognitive function can become profoundly impaired or inaccessible in a