Surviving as a personality disorder service

Abstract

Personality disorder services working along psychotherapeutic lines gained appeal with Health Care Commissioners following the publication of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines for Borderline & Antisocial Personality Disorders and the emerging successful application of psychoanalytically derived approaches. In parallel to this creative development, the economic downturn has faced the National Health Service (NHS) with considerable challenges in its ongoing survival. The potential for creative pursuit often then sits in competition, juxtaposed with the need to survive. We examine the impact of this dynamic upon the therapeutic efforts of a newly established personality disorder service. We suggest that both conscious and unconscious aspects stirred up within such encounters are demanding of the need for development of a capacity within each to bear contact with unfamiliar experiences. Through attention to that development, both patient and clinician may further enliven and enrich individual and collective identities, such that the potential to survive creatively is actualized.

Keywords::

• mentalizing
• unheimlich
• personality disorder

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the dedication of the Touchstone team in supporting the patients who we endeavour to help and we extend our gratitude to the patients of Touchstone, for the courage displayed and mutual creativity found through that same endeavour.

Notes

^1. Our thanks goes to Dr Michael Parsons, for directing our attention to Freud's unheimlich encounter, in a presentation to the Science Museum, London 2011, as part of the exhibition ‘Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious in Everyday life.’