The personality theorist, according to the editor of one of the leading journals in the field (Funder, 1994), has "an interest in what individual human beings think, feel, and do," including "how the social situation affects and is affected by the individual." Personality theory, wrote Walter Mischel, is concerned not only with differences between individuals, but also with "the basic processes of adaptation through which people interact with the conditions of their lives" (Mischel, 1993). .
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
One of the primary disorders of the personality is borderline personality disorder or BPD. The core symptom in the syndrome known as BPD is emotional dysregulation. Emotional dysregulation is viewed as a joint outcome of biological disposition, environmental context, and the transaction between the two during development. Borderline individuals have difficulties in regulating several, if not all, emotions. This systemic dysregulation is produced by emotional vulnerability and by maladaptive and inadequate emotion modulation strategies (Linehan, 1993).
The symptoms of borderline patients are similar to those for which most people seek psychiatric help: depression, mood swings, the use and abuse of drugs and alcohol as a means of trying to feel better; obsessions, phobias, feelings of emptiness and loneliness, inability to tolerate being alone, problems about eating. Of course many individuals have these symptoms but the diagnosis is based on multiple symptoms of a severe nature.
Borderline people also show great difficulties in controlling rage; they are unusually impulsive, they fall in and out of love suddenly; they tend to idealize other people and then abruptly despise them. A consequence of all this was that they typically look for help from a therapist and then suddenly quit in terrible disappointment and anger. Underneath all these symptoms, therapists see in borderline people an inability to tolerate the levels of anxiety, frustration, rejection and loss that most people are able to deal with in daily life.
