La dépression chez la personnalité limite

Abstract

The author examines the impact of depression in borderline personality and attempts to explain its profound reasons from a psychoanalytical perspective. The psychic organization of the borderline personality predisposes to intense depressive affects. Being unable to come to a sufficiently harmonious psychic integration of life experiences and emotions, the individual conserves a divided and rigid organization of his internal world. The self is thus weakened and vulnerable, confused and defensive, what constitutes grounds for depressive affects. The diagnosis commands meticulous attention, because the borderline personality has tendency to project his difficult affects on people around him. It is often the therapist who first experiences the depression. The borderline personality's recourse to primitive defences renders him even more vulnerable and fragile in his interpersonal relationships and the failures are multiplied in his adaptation to the real world, education, work, personal relationship, etc. The author explains how the borderline personality has a particular way of entering in relation with people and situations. The borderline personality has a diffuse identity and does not distinguish well the borders between himself and the other. Thus, the borderline personality perceives the other more like an instrument to satisfy his own desires and needs. The other does not appear as similar and equal. His relational mode remains essentially narcissistic and his choices of objects as much as his identifications remain of narcissistic nature. This creates a confusion between a more or less important part of his Self and the other. Relational instability of the borderline personality entails breakups, losses that easily become sources of depression. The individual thus becomes lost, empty, depressed as if he was in fact losing an important part of himself.