ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a comparative psychoanalytic review of somatic and borderline states of mind. Bérengère de Senarclens and Christian Seulin come from somewhat different psychoanalytic viewpoints and draw on clinical experience to explore the common and diverse features of the psychic structure and quality of psychisation—including the failing capacity for symbolisation and the developmental trajectory—of somatic and borderline patients. By engendering an excess of unrepresentable excitation and by harming the vicissitudes of the economic aspect of the drive, trauma is considered to be at the root of both borderline and somatic states. When explored from an object relations perspective, the principal distinction between the two group of patients is expressed in the ways in which the object relations are formed and developed. In particular, the authors emphasise that in both borderline and somatic states the object is not recognised as another subject. Physically ill patients suffer the loss of subjectivity into the body, whereas for borderline patients, the link with their not-subject object is marked by an inability to accept its loss. This difference is seen to be manifested in the specificity of the transference and countertransference that analysts encounter in their work with such patients.
