RE: borderline personality disorder

John Touzios (JTouzios@mwumail.midwestern.edu)
Wed, 07 Apr 1999 16:26:03 -0500 

Am wondering though whether term "madness" has any currency
within psychiatry/psychology today.

Denis,
  Perhaps only when referring to the coloquial usage: THIS WEEKEND ONLY: 
MUSCLE CAR MADNESS!
  Sorry.  Geez, you have to give a talk on post-war madness?  I hope you'll be 
sensitive to the idea of center, for how can one define a personality disorder 
without a reference point?  The Taoist language gives a really great way to 
think about madness: "Return is the movement of the Tao." -Lao Tzu.  The idea 
is that there are patterns, or deities, with which a person can come to 
identify oneself for longer than it is appropriate and this constitutes 
madness.  Notice the way those words ran, and you see an underlying assumption 
that the person is somehow seperate from those patterns.  For the life of me I 
don't know how.  I like Christ's remark, "You know not from where the wind 
comes, nor to where it goes," which allows for the wind to exist, nonetheless.
 You just don't know why it has to be that way; it just does.  [Incidentally, 
he promises that there *is* a reason...]  Let me write a very important 
disclaimer, here, and say that although a person *is* mad does not mean that I 
as a centered human being have any superiority over that person, and yet I do.
 I don't because if I did then I would only be presenting the person with 
another pattern to follow, thus defeating my own purpose to interact with the 
person in a good way; I do have superiority over the person because I have the 
most powerful pattern of all on my side: peace (which isn't a pattern at all, 
see quote at the end of post).
  Has Franny gone mad?  If you think in the above lines then yes she has.  
She's found a book by a wandering Russian spiritualist that promises (to her) 
to ease all her suffering.  So she hides out at her parents' and dedicates her 
life to following that pattern.
  I don't think I've read any other post-war literature than Salinger, at 
least since high school, but I hope that helped.  You might want to look at 
the New Age literature out there; it's filled with madness.  Me, I'll stick 
with Jane Austen and Jerome David.
  Yours,
  John Touzios


"The Tao does nothing."
-Lao Tzu