Books
Borderline:
The Biography of a Personality Disorder
“Eerie, lyrical, and erudite.” —The New Yorker
“A well-researched and compelling account of an often baffling condition.” —Wall Street Journal
“Insightfully and plausibly rendered . . . A revealing exploration of borderline personality disorder and the future of therapies addressing it.” —Kirkus Reviews
“An enterprising and in-depth exploration of who decides what it means to be ill, how mental illness is framed in cultural narratives, and who gets shut out of those narratives.” —Publishers Weekly
“A thoughtful corrective for a thin and grim extant literature . . . Borderline illuminates [its subject] by interspersing Kriss’s historical, clinical, and critical analyses with his patients’ intimate insights and experiences.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books
“A gripping, humane, brilliantly prismatic inquiry into the peculiarities of the mind, at once a case study, an intellectual history, and a reckoning with the education of a therapist.”
—Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems
“Alexander Kriss’s Borderline is nothing short of a revelation.”
—Marin Sardy, author of The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia
“In a world where we now diagnose ourselves on TikTok, rare is the occasion to actually see what these diagnoses really mean. . . . Diagnosis is the starting point for a long conversation between a therapist and a patient about what makes for a life. Kriss’s book is not only beautiful; it demystifies and educates.”
—Jamieson Webster, PhD, author of Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis
“A dialectical treat, with alternating chapters that provide original musings on the history of psychoanalysis and that present a six-year case study of Kriss’s work with a patient. . . . Of interest to anyone who is curious about what happens in psychotherapy.” —Elliot Jurist, PhD, author of Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy
“One would be hard-pressed to find a more intimate account of a practiced clinician’s experience of working with patients with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder than what Dr. Alexander Kriss so generously offers us.” —Christopher Christian, PhD, editor in chief, Psychoanalytic Psychology
