An insecure and unstable sense of identity is fundamental to borderline personality disorder (BPD). Even as researchers in the field urge that clinicians move away from categorizing people with personality disorders to seeing their disturbances as resting on a continuum, this fact remains indisputable. The question is, though, how best to capture these features of identity in a systematic way.

If you have a friend or relative with BPD, you can relate to the existence of these identity disturbances. The person may constantly ask you for reassurance, behave in completely different ways with different people, and complain of having a chronic sense of emptiness. As sympathetic toward the person as this makes you feel, it can also be exhausting and confusing to know how to act. Imagining what it’s like on the “inside” for this person may be hard but could also be informative as you figure out how to be more empathetic.

According to a new study by University of Amsterdam’s Annabel Bogaerts and colleagues (2024), identity disturbance is fundamental not only to BPD but also, potentially, to other personality disorders. The best way to conceptualize this disturbance, furthermore, is to see it as emerging during the transition from adolescence to adulthood, when the search for self-definition is more or less universal.

This developmental perspective is particularly helpful in seeing people with BPD as having faltered in grappling with questions such as “Who am I?” and “What do I want out of life?” These individuals also, as noted by the U. Amsterdam authors, struggle with understanding themselves in relation to other people, particularly given that they may have been parented in a confusing and inconsistent manner.

To get to the root of identity disturbance, which Bogaerts et al. regard as a........

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