[A "condemned" child. Case of borderline personality disorder]

The import of this observation resides in the significance of the patient's destiny and in the poor organization of his personality, indicating that defense mechanisms may have been prevented from building up as a result of the bearing of real and phantasmic events on his mental working. We speculate that a mechanism as essential as interiorization could not develop, as a direct result of the continuous confrontation of conflicts with a disrupted reality and the recollection of this last. The limits constituted by death and incest could not be normally interiorized and integrated within the psychic organization of this young boy, "doomed" at the age of four, and perhaps even earlier.