Patients with personality disorders have alloplastic defenses and an external locus of control. In other words: rather than accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions, they tend to blame other people or the outside world for their misfortune, failures, and circumstances. Consequently, they fall prey to paranoid persecutory delusions and anxieties. When stressed, they try to preempt (real or imaginary) threats by changing the rules of the game, Introducing new variables, or by trying to manipulate their environment to conform to their needs. They regard everyone and everything as mere instruments of Gratification.
Patients with Cluster B personality disorders (Narcissistic, antisocial, Borderline, and Histrionic) are mostly ego-syntonic, even though they are faced with formidable character and behavioral deficits, emotional deficiencies and lability, and overwhelmingly wasted lives and squandered potentials. Such patients do not, on the whole, find their personality traits or behavior objectionable, unacceptable, disagreeable, or alien to their selves.
There is a clear distinction between patients with personality disorders, and patients with psychoses (schizophrenia-paranoia and the like). As opposed to the latter, the former have no hallucinations, delusions or thought disorders. At the extreme, subjects who suffer from the Borderline Personality Disorder experience brief psychotic “microepisodes”, mostly during treatment. Patients with personality disorders are also fully oriented, with clear Senses (sensorium), good memory and a satisfactory general fund of knowledge.
September 1st, 2009 at 4:53 am
[...] imagination we age.” Psychoanalysis is not scientific theory in the strict sense of the word carefully has long been established. However, most of the criticisms of Freud’s work (by many of Karl [...]