States of mind organization in personality disorders. Typical states and the triggering of inter-state shifts

It is possible to portray patients suffering from personality disorders using Horowitz’s States of Mind Theory, according to which each disorder features its own particular set of forms of subjective experience (states of mind) and the shifting from one state to another is done under compulsion. If we want to define personality disorders correctly we need to define the rules causing inter-state shifts and, as a result, creating personality organization. The prime candidates to acting as these rules constraining the shifts are interpersonal patterns and shortfalls in the ability to metarepresent internal experience and others’ psychological worlds. We shall illustrate these hypotheses with some session transcript extracts involving patients suffering from personality disorders. In the transcripts we have pinpointed the initial state of mind, the cause of the shift and the state of mind the patient has moved into. The discussion of the theory that personality disorders are organizations of states of mind in which the inter-state shifts are constrained will be on the basis of some clinical examples