This chapter sheds light on phenomenological aspects of personality disorders. Although research on personality disorders has increased in the last decades, it remains relatively underexamined compared to other mental health conditions. This discrepancy is even more evident in phenomenological psychopathology. To fill this lacuna, this chapter offers an analysis of the implicit, temporal foundation of self-experience in personality disorders. It is argued that personality disorders can be understood in terms of a temporal inflexibility of the self. Important aspects of lived inflexibility are described across five topoi: repetitiveness of interpersonal patterns, affective rigidity, reification of self-experience, lack of future openness, and the feeling of being stuck.

The person’s values determine the meaning structure of the world they live in and drive their actions. The depressed patient’s values tend to change dramatically over the weeks and usually return to normal. At the height of their illness, patients can constantly feel that they are transgressing important personal and group values.

Examining the values at play is similar to creating a map with three dimensions: (1) the level of organization/proximity to primary stakeholders; (2) the hierarchy; and (3) the temporality of values. The patient’s values can be misaligned with those of others temporarily owing to the illness, and value-mapping can facilitate realignment. Changes in value hierarchy are often necessary for recovery. These changes can be dramatic and can happen at a faster pace whilst the person is becoming ill and during recovery.

The patient can be temporarily cut off from the values they would normally hold. Besides records of their former wishes and collateral information, sources of knowledge about value changes include peer support workers, first-hand narratives, philosophical and social scientific studies, media reports, and art portrayal of depression. Changes in one’s life narrative are also essential for recovery and resilience. The patient’s social environment, including the professionals, can facilitate (or hinder) this.

This paper addresses the phenomenology of emotion dysregulation, focusing on borderline personality disorder (BPD). We emphasize how (a) emotions ordinarily arise within the context of a structured experiential world, (b) emotions play a role in maintaining, repairing, and reshaping that world, and (c) both the world's stability and the workings of emotion processes depend on our being able to relate to other people in certain ways. We go on to show how, if (a), (b), and (c) are accepted, emotion dysregulation (of the kind associated with BPD) is implied by a way of experiencing and relating to the social world as whole. Hence, it is not to be conceived of simply as a matter of disordered emotion. Rather, it involves emotions operating upon a disordered world. Furthermore, given that other people play essential roles in sustaining a structured, practically meaningful world and regulating the emotions that arise within it, emotion regulation and dysregulation turn out to be interpersonal, rather than wholly intrapersonal, in structure.