O Borderline como patologia do social: psicanálise, psiquiatria e neoliberalismo

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between borderline personality disorder and neoliberal social organization, drawing on the concept of social pathology. To this end, we employ the psychoanalytic research method, conducting the study from a non-dogmatic perspective, without claiming to construct a totalizing body of knowledge. We begin by examining the diagnostic category of borderline in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, highlighting the significant role this category played in the transformations of these fields during the 1970s. The shift resulting from this crisis in psychiatry led to a new way of interpreting suffering and marked the convergence of this field with neoliberalism, which was taking hold during the same period. We define neoliberalism as the political construction of society according to the market model. One of the main changes promoted by neoliberalism is a new conception of freedom in opposition to equality. This change places alterity in a position of danger to be rejected. Borderline corresponds to this mode of functioning but does not fit the new way of interpreting suffering in neoliberal psychiatry. Drawing on Freud and André Green, we argue that psychoanalysis offers an interpretation of borderline by questioning the limits of the psyche, the structure of the ego, and the relationship with alterity (both internal and external). Finally, we contend that contemporary psychoanalytic practice reinforces the commitment of psychoanalysis to the clinical potential of alterity, thereby positioning itself as a practice of resistance to neoliberalism.