Patients with borderline personality disorder lack the capacity to establish a coherent self-concept. Instead, they adopt

Patients with borderline personality disorder lack the capacity to establish a coherent self-concept. Instead, they adopt what could be called a ‘post-modernist’ stance towards their life, switching from one present to the next and being totally identified with their present state of affect. Instead of repression, their means of defense consists in a temporal splitting of the self […] The price, however, consists in a chronic feeling of inner emptiness caused by the inability to integrate past and future into the present and thus to establish a coherent sense of identity.

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