PERSONALITY-DISORDER AND THE MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF EARLY SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

Controversy surrounds the role of early social experience in the devel opment of personality disorder. In particular, little is known of the means by which continuities from infancy through adulthood might be me diated. One suggestion is that a person's mental representations of re lations between him- or herself and other people, either in the form o f ''internal working models'' or ''internal object relations,'' provid e the essential link. We report on an investigation of this issue in w hich we focused on the formal qualities of accounts of childhood offer ed by adults who were drawn from two contrasting clinical groups; bord erline personality disorder and dysthymia. The results lend support to the claims made by attachment theory and the object relations school of psychoanalysis, that at least in certain groups of individuals, adu lts' modes of representing early experience are intimately related to styles of interpersonal functioning. More specifically, the form of in terpersonal psychopathology characteristic of borderline personality d isorder may be associated with enmeshed and unresolved patterns of res ponding to the Adult Attachment Interview of George, Kaplan, and Main (1985) and with reports of low maternal care and high maternal overpro tection on the Parental Bonding Instrument of Parker, Tupling, and Bro wn (1979).