Borderline Personality Disorders, Affects, and Value Disruptions

This chapter explores the phenomenological structure of emotional dysregulation in individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD), focusing on how affective valuing disrupts the intentional coherence of meaning-making. Drawing on Husserl’s theory of intentionality and mereological foundation, it analyzes how axiological acts overpower ontological concreteness, leading to fragmented intersubjective experiences. This chapter examines how these disruptions result in erratic emotional resonance and unstable identity, contributing to the clinical features of BPD. Integrating lived experience narratives, phenomenological psychopathology, and first-person testimony, it highlights how emotional excess distorts affective and cognitive representation, creating existential dissonance in relationships and self-perception. This chapter proposes that emotional instability in BPD is less about emotional intensity per se and more about a peculiar way to integrate affective values with stable self-world meaning. It further argues that clinical treatment must address this axiological distortion by reinforcing continuity in the affective lifeworld. Therapeutic suggestions include phenomenological interventions that restore embodied intersubjectivity, clarify intentional content, and reduce existential opacity. By highlighting the co-foundational role of value in experience, this chapter aims to offer a new diagnostic and therapeutic framework that links affective instability to disruptions in the very act of making sense of one’s world and place within it.