Borderline:
The Biography of a
Personality Disorder
“Insightfully and plausibly rendered . . . an illuminating survey of the prominence of the disorder in the history of psychology and psychiatry.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[An] enterprising and in-depth exploration of who decides what it means to be ill, how mental illness is framed in cultural narratives, and who gets shut out of those narratives . . . an ambitious reassessment of an understudied condition.” —Publishers Weekly
“Gripping, humane, brilliantly prismatic . . . at once a case study, an intellectual history, and a reckoning with the education of a therapist.”
—Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems
“Alexander Kriss’s Borderline is nothing short of a revelation.”
—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 . . . Kriss’s book is not only beautiful; it demystifies and educates.”
—Jamieson Webster, PhD, author of Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis
“A dialectical treat . . . [Kriss] encourages us to face underlying sexist assumptions and to question the boundaries of ‘normal’ human life. [His book] will be of interest to anyone who is curious about what happens in psychotherapy.” —Elliot Jurist, PhD, author of Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy
“One would be hard-pressed to find a more intimate account of a practiced clinician’s experience of working with patients with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder than what Dr. Alexander Kriss so generously offers us.” —Christopher Christian, PhD, editor in chief, Psychoanalytic Psychology