Borderline by Alexander Kriss

NEW DEALS

Praise for THE GAMING MIND

Psychotherapist Kriss debuts with an unusual case for the benefits of playing video games… draw[ing] on personal and patient experiences to explore the ‘nuance and complexity’ of video games… A thoughtful contribution to an ongoing debate – KIRKUS REVIEWS

A kaleidoscopic biography of borderline personality disorder, revealing the condition’s hopeful – and treatable – future.

‘Difficult’. ‘Impossible to treat’. ‘Dropout’.

Patients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are nearly always defined as a problem. Not only by popular culture and its depictions of mercurial, manipulative women (and they’re almost always women), but often by mental-health workers, those professionally pledged to offer therapy to the traumatized and suffering.

Supervisors warned Alexander Kriss early in his career that BPD patients weren’t worth the trouble. But after a life-changing encounter with a borderline patient named Ana, he became invested in uncovering the truth behind this stigmatized, poorly understood, yet increasingly prevalent condition.

In this deeply researched, humane investigation, Kriss uncovers the lost history of BPD. He reveals a thread of trauma deferred, from hysteria in ancient Greece to the seemingly scattered constellation of symptoms that today we recognise as a distinct disorder. He draws on his extensive work with BPD patients in his psychotherapy practice, painting an intimate portrait of what it’s like to live with the condition. Ultimately Kriss tells a moving story of persistence and life: how individuals struggle and flourish, even in the face of a society that shirks collective responsibility for its individual traumas.

ALEXANDER KRISS is a clinical psychologist and author based in New York. He received his doctorate from The New School for Social Research and completed internship training at Columbia University Medical Center. At his private practice Kriss provides psychoanalytic and existential psychotherapy to adolescents and adults dealing with a wide range of issues, chief among them borderline personality disorder. He serves as an adjunct professor of psychology at the City College of New York and Fordham University, and as a clinical associate at the Safran Center for Psychological Services. He is the recipient of a University in Exile Fellowship from The New School and a Scholar Award from the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology. He is the author of THE GAMING MIND: A New Psychology of Videogames and the Power of Play (The Experiment (US); Robinson (UK), 2020).

Agent: Tisse Takagi

Publisher: Beacon Press Delivery: December 2022 Publication: Autumn 2023 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 85,000 words

All rights available excluding US & Canada (Beacon Press)