The concept of borderline personality disorder emerged in medical literature in the 1930s, for patients whose symptoms didn’t fit any other diagnoses. Harold Searles, a psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge, described these patients as too “audience-oriented”15: they patterned their sense of identity on other people’s expectations. In 1980, the diagnosis was added to the DSM, which noted that “the disorder is more commonly diagnosed in women.”16 Its defining features, which include excessive emotions, lack of self-control, and a fragmented sense of self, seem to pathologize stereotypically feminine
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