Abstract
It is often emphasised that persons diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) show difficulties in understanding their own psychological states. In this article, I argue that from a phenomenological perspective, BPD can be understood as an existential modality in which the embodied self is profoundly saturated by an alienness regarding the person’s own affects and responses. However, the balance of familiarity and alienness is not static, but can be cultivated through, e.g., psychotherapy. Following this line of thought, I present the idea that narrativising experiences can play an important role in processes of appropriating such embodied self-alienness. Importantly, the notion of narrative used is that of a scalar conception of narrativity as a variable quality of experience that comes in degrees. From this perspective, narrative appropriation is a process of gradually attributing the quality of narrativity to experiences, thereby familiarising the moods, affects, and responses that otherwise govern ‘from behind’. Finally, I propose that the idea of a narrative appropriation of embodied self-alienness is also relevant to the much-debated question of personal responsibility in BPD, particularly as this question plays out in psychotherapeutic contexts where a narrative self-appropriation may facilitate an increase in sense of autonomy and reduce emotions of guilt and shame.
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Notes
This framing of embodied selfhood resembles that of Martin Heidegger when he states: ‘Then everything we call our bodiliness down to the last muscle-fiber and down to the most hidden molecule of hormones, belongs essentially to existing’ [24, p. 232].
For an account that specifies a framework for this gradual transition, see [34].
From a narratological point of view, one might feel unease about Goldie’s application of the concept of free indirect discourse to the question of self-narration, since free indirect discourse refers specifically to 3rd person narration. In defence of Goldie, we might say that this is exactly his point—that we narrate ourselves as another, as from a third person perspective.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Danish Counsel of Independent Research (DFF). My thanks to Samuel Thoma, Ditte Winther-Lindqvist, Thomas Schwarts-Wentzer, and the members of Research Group for Philosophical Hermeneutics at Aarhus University for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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Køster, A. Narrative self-appropriation: embodiment, alienness, and personal responsibility in the context of borderline personality disorder. Theor Med Bioeth 38, 465–482 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-017-9422-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-017-9422-z