The Phenomenology of Mutual Trust in Psychotherapy: A Relational Account of Meaning-Making in Recovering the Self in Borderline Personality Disorder

In this work, I deploy recent philosophical and empirical work on self-ownership in mental illness and the distinctive phenomenology of identity disturbance to show that the complex relationship between agentic awareness and that of narrative self-creation in dissonance cases is best understood integratively against the wider background of a subject’s intersubjective agency. I argue that the phenomenology of mutual trust is conceptually and ontogenetically prior to individual self-ownership in clinical cases involving an unstable sense of self, for which reason fragmentations to this and other intersubjective aspects of shared engagements play a significant explanatory role in understanding the phenomenology of identity disturbance in psychological dissociation characteristic of adults with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The intersubjective relational dimension of my account is central because, and in so far as, therapeutic hope points towards as second-person dimension of subjectivity—even in breakdown of social cognition.