The experience of borderline phenomena through cinema: Guentin Tarantino's Reservoir dogs, true romance, and pulp fiction.

Abstract

The experience of many patients with borderline personality is intense and kaleidoscopic. These qualities may be represented in film in ways that reflect and convey their essential features that are less readily captured in words. Quentin Tarantino has produced a trilogy of films that bring to light and to life the borderline experience. We use these movies to illustrate and discuss five key borderline themes: the fluid nature of drive derivatives, the discontinuous experience of time and space, the coniflicted search for an idealized parent, antisocial distortions of the superego, and the organizing and stabilizing function of a central romantic fantasy.