Le Problème des Troubles de la Personnalité en Psychiatrie

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Abstract
Psychiatric patients with personality disorders are among the most difficult because of the counter-transferential strain they put on clinicians and the paucity of specific treatment. The author develops the point that personality disorders are not diseases as implied in Axis I disorders, but social illness syndromes which depict systemic problems in which clinicians can be engulfed and entrapped. The difficult patient does not exist in isolation, a victim of his own drives and psyche, but rather is a specific socio-cultural actor living and emerging from a particular environmental context. Personality disorders are considered to be interpersonal patterns in which a person's debilitating behaviour elicits complementary behaviour that reinforces the original behaviour. Within a systems perspective, there is not a disordered personality so much as a disordering system of relationships. As with families and society, healers too become involved in the vicious cycle of personality disorders if they fail to see the manipulative interpersonal devices used by these patients. If clinicians accept too naively the lay person's simplistic belief that personality disorders are diseases to be treated by psychiatrists, they run the risk of fostering inappropriate passivity in patients in the face of life demands. Overindulgence and angry rejection are the two major pitfalls often seen in clinical practice. The approach proposed here may seem conterintuitive in laying stress on the need to actively resist the temptation to take over reponsibility for a patient's life. There is a difference between a behaviour that a patient's illness (Axis I disorder) prevents him from controlling and an impulsive deliberate behaviour stemming from character pathology. It is a logical error to deal with personality disorders in the same manner and with the same conceptual terminology as for depressive and psychotic disorders. Principles of management are detailed and can be summarized as a kind firmness to bring back patients to take on their own responsibilities.

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