Emotional dysregulation — treated in the depth-psychology corpus under the allied rubric of borderline personality disorder — occupies a charged intersection of developmental neuroscience, trauma theory, attachment research, and psychodynamic clinical practice. The literature does not reduce the phenomenon to a categorical diagnosis; rather, it positions dysregulation as the symptomatic surface of deeper structural failures. Schore traces its neurobiological roots to critical-period dyadic misattunement, arguing that frontolimbic development is compromised when early caregiving fails to provide adequate affect-regulatory scaffolding, leaving both borderline and narcissistic organizations unable to autoregulate shame or execute reciprocal autonomic control. Herman situates the same clinical presentation within the sequelae of chronic childhood trauma, emphasizing that the BPD label frequently obscures a history of relational violence and constitutes a disguised presentation of complex traumatic stress. Van der Hart and the structural-dissociation school note the symptomatic overlap between BPD, complex PTSD, and dissociative disorders — all sharing affect dysregulation, self-disorders, and relational instability. Siegel frames dysregulation as impaired integration, expressible as either chaos or rigidity. A minority voice, represented by Lench’s contributors, complicates the normative valence of dysregulation by arguing that insecurely attached individuals performing sentinel functions at the group level render dysregulation contextually adaptive. Treatment responses range from mentalization-based therapy (Bateman and Fonagy) to sensorimotor and somatic approaches, reflecting the field’s unresolved debate about whether dysregulation is primarily cognitive, relational, or embodied.