Borderline

The Biography of a Personality Disorder

By: Alexander Kriss PhD

Narrated by: Max Newland

An intimate, compassionate, and expansive portrait of Borderline Personality Disorder that rejects the conventional wisdom that this condition is untreatable, told by a psychologist who specializes in BPD

Mental illness is heavily stigmatized within our society, and within this already marginalized group, folks with BPD are deemed especially untreatable and hopeless. When, as a graduate student, Alex Kriss first began working as a therapist in the field, his supervisors warned him that borderline patients were manipulative, difficult, and had a tendancy to drop out of treatment. Yet, years later, when Kriss was establishing his private practice and a borderline patient known as Ana came to his office, he felt compelled to try to help her, despite all of the warnings he’d heard.

Borderline is the story of his work with Ana—how his successes with her led him to open his doors to other BPD patients and advocate for them. Borderline is also the story of the disorder itself: Kriss traces accounts of the condition going back to antiquity, showing how this disease has been known by many names over the millennia, most of them gendered: possession, hysteria, witchcraft, moral insanity. All referred to a person—usually a woman—whose behavior and personality were seen as fractured, unstable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. Kriss guides us through this history up through the emergence of psychotherapy, the development of the modern diagnosis, and attitudes toward treatment today.

©2024 Alexander Kriss (P)2024 Beacon Press

Critic reviews

“A gripping, humane, brilliantly prismatic inquiry into the peculiarities of the mind, at once a case study, an intellectual history, and a reckoning with the education of a therapist.” —Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders

“Alexander Kriss’s Borderline is nothing short of a revelation. In lucid and intensely readable prose, Kriss brings us into the world of his patients who live ‘on the borderline,’ illuminating a profoundly misunderstood condition with rigor and humanity in equal measure. . . . Perhaps most importantly, he provides clear reasons why there is hope for such patients going forward.” —Marin Sardy, author of The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia

“In a world where we now diagnose ourselves on TikTok, rare is the occasion to actually see what these diagnoses really mean. . . . Diagnosis is the starting point for a long conversation between a therapist and a patient about what makes for a life. Kriss’s book is not only beautiful; it demystifies and educates.” —Jamieson Webster, author of Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis

Great performance

The performance really added to the engagement. A great mix of case study and historical information.

Pretty wokey but worthwhile

This is one of the better contemporary books on BPD, especially in its relationship to other Cluster B disorders like NPD. Compelling clinical vignettes and good, thorough history of the concept of BPD. Like most work in this field though, it is thoroughly infused with the language and assumptions of what some would call Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory (various lenses of privilege, capitalism is bad, lived experience, and all the rest). Personally, that’s an annoying turn off, but I still found it worthwhile.