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pinksoil said:
We talked about why we like Freud. We talked about the Psychoanalytic Diagnostic Manual and Nancy McWilliams' interpretations of borderline character functioning and borderline personality disorder. I told him how in all my treatment before him, I was always labeled by doctors and therapists as a "borderline."

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I have several articles by a mathematician named E.C Zeeman, who, a number of years ago, did some modeling of anorexia nervosa, following the therapy of J. Hevesi, a British therapist. I have found Zeeman's work very valuable in understanding my own situation. One thing he said is "The advantage of using mathematical language for a model is that it is psychologically neutral; it permits a coherent synthesis of a large number of observations that would otherwise appear disconnected..."

You may think that mathematics might be the last thing that would be helpful in understanding "mental illness," but in this case that is not so. One of the things I find about myself at the moment is that my mental state/mood is very unstable. So I think I might be considered "borderline character" something or other. It is very easy for this kind of characterization to become a damaging label. But instability does not have to be so; it can just be a fact, and accepted as such. It does not have to be made into a value statement about someone's character. The mathematical model, called, at least at the time, "Catastrophe Theory," shows how to understand the instability, and maybe leads to how to successfully treat it.