What is the Core of Borderline Personality Disorder?

This video answers the question: What is the core of borderline personality disorder? The term ‘core” refers to the most basic, central concept that we can link to borderline personality disorder. Borderline personality disorder is a Cluster B personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, so it's in the same cluster as antisocial, histrionic, and narcissistic, personality disorders. This cluster is the dramatic, erratic, and emotional cluster. The symptom criteria for borderline personally disorder include frantic efforts to avoid abandonment; unstable relationships (idealization and devaluation, love/hate cycle); identity disturbance (unstable sense of self); impulsivity and at least two areas that could be self-damaging; suicidal behavior; affective instability (emotional dysregulation); chronic feelings of emptiness; inappropriate, intense anger; and paranoid ideation or severe dissociation.

Meares, R., Gerull, F., Stevenson, J., & Korner, A. (2011). Is self disturbance the core of borderline personality disorder? An outcome study of borderline personality factors. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 45(3), 214–222.