The nincompoops want to eliminate Borderline?

It seems that the existence of the Borderline Personality is being questioned.* Let me clear it up for all the PhDs out there. Borderline is dissimilar to the other personality disorders where there is a primary identifying quality and its ego-syntonic attitude. A Narcissist has perfection. A Dependent won't make decisions, requires the symbiotic feeling. Antisocial personalities have no conscience. A Histrionic person is shallow and dramatic and must be the center of a crowd. A Schizoid is detached. Each of these disorders can be revealed to have an attitude that is in harmony with the identifying feature. A Dependent is fine to be that way and may not even understand independence, may feel torturously uncomfortable with thoughts of separation, initiative and autonomy. A Narcissist finds the notion that he may be imperfect ridiculous, angering, unthinkable. A Schizoid is overwhelmingly complacent in his detachment. All these personalities have an endorsed tangible dysfunction.

Borderlines are thought to embody the stigmas of bitchiness, manipulation, of being emotional projectile bleeders. But many are not this way. They may not have a conspicuous brand. They may be assiduous (my first wife, Borderline, was a high school science teacher for many years) or infantile (unable to keep any job for more than a few days or weeks). They may brandish their primitiveness like a sword or badge of honor, or they may be sophisticated and cerebral. They may be suicidal and self-injurious or safe. They may be desperate for a relationship, or not. What makes these divergent presentations all Borderline? What is their underlying unity? A separation-individuation-stage developmental immaturity and its resultant out-of-sync-ness with the world of its time. It's the abort of psychological growth beyond infancy. This is a lost child in an adolescent's or adult's body. To be an adolescent or adult having to manage the world from an infant's inchoateness, confusion, emotionality is to be sane while insane, disintegrative but perforce held-together, a helium balloon of "thought" pulled under by an ocean of sharks.

Borderline Personality is not in the same trait category as the other personality disorders because it is the fundamental flaw at the base of all of them. The other personalities start from Borderline's failure to pass the starting gate in infancy. They all will reveal, in therapy, an essential immaturity, a "man-baby," a radical dependency on someone. The psychopath is completely dependent on victims, the narcissist on human ego supplies, the histrionic on an audience. "The creative work of these apparently detached individuals" – Schizoids – "may perhaps provide a round-about way of finding some form of social attachment."** Borderline is the skeletal structure of wrongness – the first mother-child breach – that will in time require global defenses, the pervasive, inflexible take on self and world, to maintain continuity in its second-by-second, day-to-day existence. As the other disorders will show this primordial "failure to launch," so Borderline will contain features of narcissism, alienation, dependency, sociopathy, eccentricity.

Sometimes I have diagnosed Borderline but have not recorded it in the client's chart. She might not meet official criteria, but there will be a fundamental incongruity, the prepotent impotent child competing with the adult, an immaturity that she is blind to. She will be smaller than her children, alienated from and rageful at them. She will speak and be triggered by her own words to tears because she is primarily pain. The therapist will have a feeling that says: She is not really here. She is in the past.

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* https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/202207/is-it-finally-time-eliminate-the-borderline-diagnosis

** https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5840255/