Genealogia del disturbo borderline come problematizzazione dell'autonomia nel mondo contemporaneo. Un tentativo di analisi della medicalizzazione delle condotte impulsive e dei problemi di autorolazione nelle odierne "istituzioni del sè"

Starting from the recognition of the significant ethical importance, on an individual and collective level, of the problem of self-regulation in the contemporary world, I attempted to carry out a genealogical analysis of Borderline Personality Disorder, with a specific focus on the question of impulsiveness and of the relationship with limits. Looking at the relations between the philosophical, psychological-clinical, educational and political dimensions, and examining how the possibility of constructing an autonomous subjectivity has become a central problem with the onset of modernity, I reconstructed a critical history of the borderline disorder as a subject of psychological and psychiatric discourse, as a means to reflect epistemologically upon this field of knowledge and on the historical articulations of psychological distress and of its treatment. I divided my historical inquiry into three parts, corresponding to the main forms that BPD, a hard to define clinical entity always on the threshold of diagnostic impossibility, took on over time. Firstly, I analysed moral insanity during the course of the 1800s (also using a research on the confinement and psychiatrisation of insane people/moral idiots between 1873 and 1939 in Venice’s former mental hospitals, carried out through a qualitative analysis of some clinical case histories found in the archives of the San Servolo and San Clemente institutions). Secondly, I considered the borderline syndrome between the 1930s and 1970s. Psychoanalytic theories are the main reference for this period, during which the borderline label will come eventually to designate a personality organisation, a stably unstable identity structure. Thirdly, I examined the Borderline Personality Disorder from the 1980s, when some temperamental dimensions of a biochemical origin such as impulsiveness became central in this diagnostic category.