Borderline Personality
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borderline personality has a basic defect of identity. That is, he
failed to identify adequately as a child and did not internalize the
common values and understandings that most of us take for granted and
tend to live by. He grows up thinking that other people have the answers
that have eluded him and that if he could only discover what they are,
he would be able to come in out of the cold and have a better sense of
fitting in and belonging. As a searcher for answers and as a person who
really does not understand other people, he typically over-idealizes
those whom he feels can fill the vast empty holes in his identity. Thus,
he falls intensely, unrealistically, worshipfully in love, putting his
love-objects up on the highest pedestals, or he becomes exaggeratedly,
fanatically attracted to religion and those who hold out their beliefs
as the one true answer. However, because no person or exemplar of
a belief system can live up to his idealized expectations or
really holds the key that will open the door to what is missing in his
personality, he repeatedly falls from the heights of his unrealistically
great expectations. The fall is a long and painful one and leaves him
feeling forlorn, angry, and full of hatred.
The over-idealizing believer is depicted in the image raising his head and his hands to the heavens. The hurt, angry, disillusioned empty vessel is shown reaching down toward the fires of Hell. These people typically admit to feeling torn apart by the intensity of their conflicting feelings and motives. They are developmentally caught between paranoid anger and hostility, on the one side, and depressive-like over-dependency, on the other side, and they tend to vacillate between these ambivalent extremes. Hence, the symbol of one person being pulled in two by opposite attractions. These are the ones who will get LOVE tattooed across the fingers of one hand and HATE across the fingers of the other, or other such tattooed symbols of the ambivalence that continuously tears at them. Because the borderline individual has so little understanding of the world and so little sense of inner direction, he feels lost in and buffeted by a world full of forces that push him first this way and then pull him next that way. Hence the portrayal of his environment in the image as desolate, lonely, and full of turbulence. The skies seem alive with movement to symbolize how pushed and pulled he feels by his surroundings. |
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