The Colonized Psyche: A Psychoanalytic Differentiation Between Complex PTSD and Borderline Personality Disorder

Accepted manuscript (postprint) of an article published in Psychoanalytic Psychology (American Psychological Association).

This article proposes a psychoanalytic differentiation between Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), arguing that the former constitutes not merely a set of cumulative traumatic events but a structural colonization of the psychic apparatus. Drawing on Ferenczi's concepts of identification with the aggressor and disavowal, and on Bion's notion of the unprocessed element, it explores how the continuity of traumatic submission reorganizes the subject's internal world under a "foreign agency" of the introjected aggressor. While BPD is characterized by fragmentation and oscillation between idealized and persecutory object relations, C-PTSD reveals a psychic regime in which selfhood becomes subordinated to the aggressor's logic. Clinical vignettes illustrate how the traumatic environment persists as a colonizing presence shaping perception, desire, and agency. Distinguishing the two is not only diagnostically relevant but ethically and clinically necessary, allowing therapeutic work to focus on the restitution of self-authorship rather than mere behavioral regulation.

The concepts of "psychic colonization," "occupied self," and "foreign agency" are the author's own formulations.

Version of record: https://doi.org/10.1037/pap0000616

Author: Bruna Lima, clinical psychologist in private practice (São Paulo, Brazil) — https://psicologabrunalima.com