Abstract:
In the decades following World War II, psychiatry in the West became the dominant means for understanding and relating to suffering and distress. In an effort to challenge the systems that produce this suffering, it is important to examine the history of these diagnostic labels, which individualize suffering thereby removing persons from the context in which their suffering is produced. In this thesis I investigate the emergence of the diagnostic label Borderline Personality Disorder within psychiatric knowledge and how this diagnosis has shifted over time. At present, the diagnosis is overwhelmingly applied to women and, of this heterogeneous group of persons, the strong correlation between them is a history of childhood abuse. Given this, I argue that the psychiatric formation of selfhood in BPD engenders the very systems which produce psychological distress. By privileging a particular way of being in the world and pathologizing the selfhood of trauma survivors, psychiatry prevents critical reflection of these systems by individualizing responses to suffering. Nikolas Rose (1996, 1999a, 2019) discussed the expansion of psychiatry as a means of understanding and relating to the self. Wirth-Cauchon (2001) has examined the gendered nature of borderline personality disorder and in doing so, has demonstrated the role of gender in informing the psychiatric conception of the self. Using Foucault’s method of genealogy, I contribute to this literature by theorizing how the construction of selfhood is formulated upon a gendered, racialized, and queered Other. Genealogy destabilizes the psychiatric conception of selfhood by situating the expansion of psychiatry’s knowledge of the self within specific sociocultural and historical epochs. This investigation calls for a critical reflection of the selfhood codified in these diagnoses and a recognition and acceptance of selfhood that is not predicated on heteronormativity and whiteness.
