The borderline as diagnostician

An autø/gnøstic reading of a history of binaries

Bibliographic Data

ID12737342
AuthorsFrancesca Lewis (University of York, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume16
Issue2
Pages104-116
Publication date2023-03-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Psychosocial Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1478-6737 • E-ISSN: 1478-6737
PublisherBristol University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1332/147867321x16778611835783
OpenAlexW4361248128
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited16

This article begins with two situated knowledges drawn from my lived experience as a feminist researcher with a ‘borderline personality disorder’ diagnosis. The first knowledge is that diagnostic and medicalised ways of framing experience (particularly the experience labelled ‘BPD’) can constitute a kind of cruel optimism, which arises ‘when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially’ and becomes ‘an obstacle to your flourishing’ (Berlant, 2011). The second knowledge is that while the label ‘BPD’ is stigmatising, pathologising and highly gendered, it refers not only to a real experience but to valuable ways of being/becoming and knowing. Here I make the case for recasting the borderline not as a patient to be diagnosed but, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, as a diagnostician whose ‘symptoms’ are the traces of unjust and harmful frameworks that work upon us all. Building on the important work of Margaret Price, whose writing on psychosocial disabilities and epistemic injustice produced the concept of counter-diagnosis, I have developed a methodology I call autø/gnøsis. Using a new materialist approach (Deleuze, Braidotti, Barad), autø/gnøsis thinks through and with the borderline self and borderline knowledges, while also acknowledging the shifting, unsteady void at the centre of these concepts

Aesthetics · Borderline personality disorder · Epistemology · Flourishing · Framing (construction · Injustice · Materialism · Objectivity (philosophy · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Situated · Sociology · Computer Science · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · History · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Social Psychology

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