This video answers the question: How does narcissism manifest in 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. There are nine symptom criteria: frantic efforts to avoid abandonment; an unstable relationship pattern; identity disturbance; impulsivity in at least two areas that could be self-damaging; suicidal behavior, threats, ideations, and gestures; affective instability, a chronic feeling of emptiness, intense and inappropriate anger, and paranoid ideation or dissociation. Borderline personality disorder is a high rate of co-occurrence with pathological narcissism. One fairly common combination is borderline personality disorder comorbid with narcissistic personality disorder, and in clinical treatment settings this particular combination is considered particularly difficult to treat. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) also has nine symptom criteria in the DSM: a grandiose sense of self-importance; fantasies about wealth and power, believing oneself to be special or unique, requiring excessive admiration from others, a sense of entitlement, a tendency to exploit other people interpersonally, a lack of empathy, envy, and arrogance. The construct of pathological narcissism doesn't overlap perfectly with narcissistic personality disorder. There are two factors to pathological narcissism: grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism. Vulnerable narcissism seems to have a lot in common with borderline personality disorder, but the overlap is not perfect.


Euler, S., Stöbi, D., Sowislo, J., Ritzler, F., Huber, C. G., Lang, U. E., … Walter, M. (2018). Grandiose and Vulnerable Narcissism in Borderline Personality Disorder. Psychopathology, 51(2), 110–121