From Disorganized Attachment to Borderline Personality Disorder: Shared Risks of Childhood Maltreatment and Pathways for Early Identification

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-553-9_62How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Borderline Personality Disorder; Disorganized Attachment; Childhood Maltreatment; Emotional Abuse; Mentalization

Abstract

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a highly disabling and treatment-resistant personality disorder strongly associated with childhood maltreatment. Disorganized attachment is one of its early predictors. This paper systematically reviews empirical and theoretical work published from 2010 to 2025, with an emphasis on studies from 2019 to 2025, to integrate developmental psychopathology, attachment theory, and recent neurobiological findings. We test the core hypothesis that childhood maltreatment—particularly emotional abuse—promotes disorganized attachment and disruptions in mentalization, forming a key developmental pathway to BPD traits. We summarize evidence that emotional abuse shows particularly strong associations with both disorganized attachment and emotion-regulation deficits and discuss mechanistic bridges—attachment insecurity, impaired mentalizing, and stress-related neurobiological changes—supported by behavioral and neuroimaging (including fNIRS) studies. That disorganized attachment acts as a key risk marker—but not destiny—for BPD, which emerges as a key conclusion. Childhood abuse, and specifically emotional abuse, is the primary shared risk pathway. Schools and community support systems represent a potential target for interventions to offer alternative safe relationships and disrupt high-risk developmental pathways.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yihan Ren
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/25
TI  - From Disorganized Attachment to Borderline Personality Disorder: Shared Risks of Childhood Maltreatment and Pathways for Early Identification
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 4th International Conference on Educational Science and Social Culture (ESSC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 565
EP  - 572
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-553-9_62
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-553-9_62
ID  - Ren2026
ER  -