Revista Internacional de Saúde Mental e Psiquiatria

Impulsiveness and Metarepresentative Functions of Borderline Patients with Psychopathic Conducts: An Experimental Study with the Rorschach Test

Maria Elena Cinti, Mara Lastretti, Antonella Pomilla,Loredana Teresa Pedata and Franco Burla

The Borderline Personality Disorder (BDP) is defined as “a pervasive pattern of instability which affects regulation, impulse control, interpersonal relationships, and self-image”. Bateman model & Fonagy model, being a connection between the psychoanalytic tradition – especially the attachment theories and the cognitive approach, identifies the inability to mentalize as a fundamental problem of borderline patients, which is meant as “the capacity to make sense of ourselves and others, implicitly and explicitly, in terms of subjective states and mental processes”. Due to the considerable number of empirical evidence on the connection between mentalization and attachment, the authors defined the obstacles related to interpersonal relationships, which represent the distinctive feature of patients with BDP and which give rise to their typical impulsive behaviours. Such behaviours can be selfinflicted by means of self-destructive acts and attempted suicide and other-directed by means of aggressiveness and violence.This study aims to verify the differences related to impulsiveness and behavioural disorder, which can emerge from the comparison between an experimental group of borderline patients and a control group of non-patients. The experimental plan considered the administration of the Rorschach test and MMPI-2. The scoring of the Rorschach test, conducted according to the Comprehensive System has showed that patients with BDP proved to be clearly more impulsive than normal individuals and less capable to control their responsiveness on the personality level. Furthermore they have fewer abilities to plan and modulate the emotional response than the control group. In this study the Rorschach test had well identified the emotional dysregulation as a meta-representative distinguishing deficit, by pointing out the BDP patients who could more probably act impulsively by means of aggressive behaviours.