title: Psychoanalytic classification and empiricism with borderline personality disorder as a model.
abstract: Psychoanalytic interest in diagnosis has traditionally addressed issues of structure of personality, defense, and repetitive maladaptive patterns of interaction with other human beings based on inferred unconscious fantasies and compromise formations. Empirical studies based on the psychoanalytic model have concentrated on study of the therapeutic process and also on study of diagnostic groups such as borderline personality disorder (BPD). The work in BPD provides a paradigm for future approaches in the study of second-order inferences removed from the immediate observational field, which is tapped by descriptive taxonomies. The concept of structure may be clarified by empirical studies using a psychoanalytic frame of reference.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Shapiro
mesh_terms: D001883:Borderline Personality Disorder / Q000145:classification* / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D010554:Personality Disorders / Q000145:classification*; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy