Spiritual and cultural implications of the borderline personality

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SPIRITUAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS

OF THE BORDERLINE PERSONALITY

The borderline personality disorder is defined in the DSM IV as a pervasive disturbance in identity and relationship functioning, with intense tendencies toward self destructive and self damaging behaviour, a preoccupation with emptiness and death, an aversion to bonding and predilection to emotionality, especially explosive anger but also withdrawal.  In this paper I am going to focus on borderline as a personality type, rather than just a disorder, and speak of borderline tendencies and themes, both in individuals and culturally.  The borderline theme is particularly of interest in that it has become so prominent in the last ten to twenty years.  It suggests not only a cultural activation but also an archetypal one.

Nathan Schwartz-Salant in his book, The Borderline Personality - Vision and Healing, suggests that a central problem for these personality types is a religious or spiritual one.  The implications of his work are that there is a subset of the borderline personality population for whom spirituality is key.  He suggests that the weak ego structure and psychodynamic developmental deficits of this typology, combined with an intuitive, deeply-felt potential for awareness of the numinous and archetypal ground of being, make this person beset by fear of overwhelm and subsequent loss of identity.  Because they are close to it, either consciously or unconsciously they remember the potential for the ecstatic healing of the re-establishment of connection to the deep archetypal self — the coniunctio in Jungian terminology.  But they are also especially vulnerable to the overwhelming aspects of this process of (re)connection to the numinous, which they often experience, according to Schwartz-Salant, as demonic forces, possession states, out of body experiences, vampire figures, multiple personality and dissociative tendencies.  He says, "For (this) borderline patient is enmeshed in psychic levels of extreme intensity that bear intimate relation to many of the great archetypal themes in history — battles between god and the devil and life and death; the soul's rebirth; and especially the great drama of union that finds expression in the archetype of the coniunctio." (Schwartz-Salant, pg. 13)

The spiritual borderline is predisposed toward the transcendent vision of rising above and going beyond.  For them the embodied experience is of a hell state charnel house, crass commercialism, failed relationship, emptiness, loneliness and despair.  Schwartz-Salant says, "Borderline patients often know .... the level  of the transcendental self.  What is not known is its immanence, for it has never (fully) incarnated." (Schwartz-Salant, pg. 28)  Spiritual borderlines are thus quintessentially, in an ongoing basic sense, disembodied.  There is a mind/body, spirit/matter split that has a dissociative quality.  Thus these people have psychic experiences, see strange lights or even UFO's and report mystical experiences.  They may either have a highly active spiritual practice or at least a spiritual orientation, which is of the New Age, nature mysticism type or perhaps an involvement with the Wicca tradition, shamanism or Tantra.  They may be practicing yoga or meditation and are typically preoccupied with cleansing, purity and naturalism.  They often report a (hyper)sensitivity to 'man' made products, such as pollution and food additives creating an environmental sensitivity theme.  They are, in general, highly sensitive people who are easily overwhelmed by the chaos and demand of the fast pace of city life, career challenges, information overload and other late 20th century urban, post modern blights.

Their upward split can translate into idealistic perfectionism, either personally or in allegiance to social causes or spiritual practices.  They can be very rigid and controlling in this sense, even puritanical and fundamentalist.  They may practice asceticisms, such as fasting and purgation or even flagellation and self mutilation, in the service of purifying themselves of worldly desires.  The puritanical, rigid, controlling tendency is matched by an intense predilection toward chaos and disruption.  In their personality they may dualistically alternate between these two.  Socially, they may be attracted to revolutionary, anarchistic causes.  The spiritual borderline has a passion for ASC;s.  This they often attain through mind altering drugs, especially of the psychedelic and entheogenic type, which they typically use in moderation as part of a counterculture lifestyle.  However their fascination with death may lead them into more severe addiction and the use of drugs such as heroin.  This desire for ASC’s is also commonly met by spiritual practices such as yoga, meditation, fasting or holotropic breathwork.

Adolph Holl’s biography of the Holy Spirit The Left Hand of God contains much borderline material.  Holl shows the Holy Spirit as a pervasive firey breath that inspires free thinking revolutionaries to abjure the social order and stand outside, in ecstasy.  It inspires prophets and social critics alike.  Holl shows (although he does not put it this way) that the Pentecostal experience overlaps considerably with the borderline tendency to social and phenomenological deconstruction and radical socialistic humanism, in which the divine is experienced as indwelling — a homo dei experience of embodied, erotic, orgasmic ecstasy that some spiritual borderlines are capable of.  In scripture and in history, Holy Spirit manifestations have been closely associated with Satanic manifestations.  Christ’s encounter with Satan during his forty days in the desert following his firey Pentecostal baptism and the temptation of St. Anthony, an early desert father are two examples of classic demonic manifestation associated with spiritual borderline personalities.  This is repeated in connection to Pentecostal religious phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The medieval association of the devil with the radical female beguine Holy Spirit socialistic lifestyle and their ecstatic, even orgasmic experience of God as the Beloved is also a borderline phenomenon.  The 19th century Romantic fascination with darkness, morbidity, cruelty, existential intensity, nature mysticism, individualism, revolt against political authority and humanistic idealism are all spiritual borderline themes.  Holl shows both Satanic and Holy Spirit religious elements in the Romantic tradition, specifically in the lives of Goethe, Nietzsche and Rilke, revealing also their fundamental borderline character structure.  He shows that in the 19th century Romantic tradition, in the 13th century beguine tradition and in the 4th century desert fathers, the ecstatic mystical light of the Paraclete emerges from the darkness of privation, loss, hunger, sleeplessness, illness, physical torture (often self administered), existential angst, self doubt and despair, all classic Satanic experiences.  This ecstatic mystical relationship between light and dark is quintessentially borderline.

This borderline theme may be understood, according to Schwartz-Salant, in terms of the borderline proclivity, to "experience the dark, disorderly aspects of the coniunctio to the exclusion of its ordering and life giving qualities." (Schwartz-Salant pg. 11).  This may be partially explained on the basis of the general developmental history of the borderline, in psychoanalytic terms, as an incomplete rapprochement phase, that period around two years old where the child is practicing separating from and returning to the mother.  In primal and prenatal psychology terms, according to Dr. Graham Farrant in his cellular consciousness work, this theme suggests a bonding problem with the mother that exists at a biochemical and spiritual level, so that the individual's incarnating spirit as  zygote is reluctant to implant in the maternal womb.  Primal experiences with these patients reveal a kind of "toxic womb" experience in which the intrauterine environment is encoded as hostile and non-nourishing, in which the placenta does not function to adequately nourish and clean the fetal blood.  A maternal overdeveloped animus with rigid body type, smoking, intense social disruption and other psychophysiological disturbing conditions predispose to this.  This maternal foetal disjunction that occurs at a physical and energetic level may be present even though the mother consciously desires the pregnancy.  This borderline difficulty with enwombment exists also at an existential and archetypal level.  In this sense it is transpersonal.  The archetypal figures of Lilith and Kali are relevant as the dark mother, the devouring mother.  The non-maternal archetypal feminine figure of Artemis or Diana can be seen in this constellation.  With the Lilith/Kali archetype there is a predilection toward dissolution and returning to voidness.  With the Artemis/Diana archetype the problem is lack of bonding at a physical level.  The personal mother may embody these archetypes or it may be a cultural constellation based in the collective consciousness that impacts on the individual socially.  For these people then, the body and the world in general becomes a poisonous place of hostility, aloneness and malnourishment.  Thus the intense rage affects and orality of the borderline, whose basic relational stance is one of not getting, but having to give and an existential predilection manifest in an ambivalence toward life.

The aversion to real joining and union (contained in the matenal/foetal disjunction) requires the borderline personality to defensively cut, split and fragment.  The central problem of this is that they don't experience themselves as having a choice.  One patient described himself as "an involuntary psychic".  They feel alienated and marginalized and often end up in a counter culture stance of non participation, which is a form of social disembodiment.  These people have an intense aversion to any union experience and will attempt to deny and cut any real bond - either with therapist (thus problematic transference/counter-transference issues), lovers (thus relational instability), society (thus marginalization) or the body (thus dissociative tendency).  This amounts to a persistent refusal of identity.  A typical borderline stance is "don't categorize me", "don't box me in", "don't label me".  They have a life of moving on, often with multiple careers and relationships.  

For the helping profession borderlines present this conundrum: "What is identity?  What is the self?  What is real relationship?"  Thus they have led psychodynamic psychology into self psychology and into a point of view that suggest relationship is what creates and defines self rather than some inner defensive structure that manages libidinal drives.  In this, the borderline theme in psychotherapy patients and millennial western culture is quintessentially postmodern, and suggests a way to respond to the culture's malaise, cynicism and fragmentation.  Perhaps as a consequence of this the borderline also encodes altruism as a preferred mode of utilizing gifts and talents.  For the borderline patient, however, this is experienced as psychodynamically enforced, a point which Schwartz-Salant makes several times.  But for the culture they express this theme as a necessary antidote to rampant individualism, consumerism and self-interested aggression.  The borderline tendency compels people to want to protect — to protect children, battered women, the disadvantaged, ethnicity and nature for example.  There is also a strange irony here however.  One borderline patient remarked to me "I like humanity.  It's people I can't stand."  Another made his dog a vegetarian.  Another once contemplated killing a neighbour who had abused a pet, and felt a righteous justification in this thought.

For themselves, and for the culture they inhabit, the borderline personality brings an incredible amount of creativity.  Their capacity to cut ties with the past means that prepackaged, preconceived notions and solutions don’t stand up under borderline scrutiny.  In addition, their profound relationship with suffering, death and annihilation fuels a compelling desire to create new forms.

Samuel Beckett may be the quintessential existential borderline artist.  His titles such as Waiting for Godot, Texts For Nothing, I can't go on, I'll go on and End Game express borderline existential despair.  He once said that he remembered being in the womb and it was "an ocean of agony".  He lived for most of his life in Paris in a small apartment which overlooked a prison yard.  When he died he directed his body be cremated and flushed down the toilet in the basement of the Abbey Theater in Dublin, in his 'mother'land.

The nihilism of the punk theme in adolescent culture, the ennui, self-destructiveness and the tendency to psychedelic drug use is an instance of the borderline theme amongst teenagers these days. There is a level of angst, despair and hopelessness that is, in part, socially conditioned by our culture's many tensions, with threats of global meltdown and such things as looming environmental disaster, terrorism and post-nuclear winter.  However the musical style and lyric contents express very clearly the existential, archetypal and transpersonal borderline themes of alienation, lack of identity, despair, nihilism and emptiness combined with a need to affirm the human capacity to endure and overcome the alienation.

Other 20th century music also enacts borderline themes.  Troubadour musicians such as Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Laurie Anderson, Marianne Faithful, Tom Waits, Jane Sibbery, John Lennon, Jefferson Airplane, Jim Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Aimee Mann and Bjork all personify the artistic, creative, revolutionary, existential, redemptive theme of the borderline.  Song titles tell the story.  According to Marianne Faithful we are all “Strangers on this Earth”, in Bob Dylan’s words on “Desolation Row” as “Fallen Angels” according to Robbie Robertson.  Sarah McLaughlin in “Witness” asks “will we burn in heaven like we do down here?”  and the Beatles sing about living life “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.  According to Dylan, however, “The Times they are a-Changin’”, a borderline classic in which “the last shall be first”.  Talking Heads advise that we should recognize ourselves as “The Dream Operator”.  Van Morrison says “Let Go into the Mystery”, the Beatles say “Let It Be” and suggest that “Life Goes On Within You and Without You”, the classical mystical borderline response to life’s suffering.  Aimee Mann however expresses the spiritual borderline mystical perspective most succinctly in her line:

“It won’t stop till we wise up”

and the way to “wise up” is to “just give up”.  While this may sound like existential nihilism in a socio political sense, we must also recognize a fundamental mystical aphorism in a spiritual sense.

In addition, conceptual frame breaking movies in the style of Romantic irony enact the borderline theme of deconstructing our everyday common sense reality in favour of a transcendent metaperspective, in which all content is recontextualized because the usual way of framing our viewpoint is undermined.  Movies such as Robert Altman’s “The Player” and “Short Cuts”,  Sally Potter’s “The Tango Lesson”, Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles”, Baz Lurman’s “Moulin Rouge”, Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show”, “The Last Wave” and “Fearless”, Tom de Cillos’ “Living in Oblivion”, Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man”, Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers”, Emir Kusturica’s “Arizona Dream”, John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness”, George Roy Hill’s “Slaughterhouse Five” and       “Memento” all convey a visceral experience of the constructed nature of our everyday sense of reality.  This is a basic borderline, spiritual existential theme.  David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”, “Lost Highway”, “Mullholland Drive” and the TV series “Twin Peaks” particularly convey a sense of something unpredictable, visceral, extraordinary, frightening and surreal underlying and structuring the everyday world.  He has particularly brought awareness of the dream like implicit structure of waking reality.  Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” most explicitly posits this and through innovative animation of reality based cinematography conveys it.  These are fundamental borderline concerns.  In addition psychological, existential, identity quest movies have portrayed this borderline theme as inherent and fundamental to 20th century Western culture.  Movies such as “Magnolia”, “Ground Hog Day”, “Grand Canyon”, :”Being There”, “Orlando”, “8½”, “The Seventh Seal” and “Blow Up” are in this category.  The borderline fascination with death as fundamental to life plays through these movies, as does the theme of the acceptance of suffering as a means or vehicle for evolution.

One final category of movies also fits the borderline theme.  These are the antiheroic, identity quest, Film Noir movies that reveal the seamy underbelly of the constructed nature of socially mediated reality.  This genre in movies relates to the punk genre of music, in its portrayal of borderline themes.  Movies such as “Happiness”, ”Sex Lies and Videotape”, ”Crimes and Misdemeanors”, ”The Big Lebowsky”, ”True Romance” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There” all fit this description.  Perhaps the most entertaining portrayal of the borderline preoccupation with identity, relationship and the constructed nature of personal reality is given in the Monty Python TV series.  Episode 2 of the series compilation that has been released on video would be the best example of this late 20th century, surrealistic, borderline genius.

Another culturally relevant theme that the spiritual borderline tendency brings into focus is liminality, the betwixt and between state of neither this nor that.  Schwartz-Salant suggests this as related to the mystical tradition of the via negativa, as expressed, for example by Nicholas of Cusa, an early Renaissance Christian mystic of the 15th century.  Described as the first modern thinker, Cusa held that since we cannot know God, we must explore how we cannot know God as the only means of knowing God.  He made a study of paradox, the doctrine of learned ignorance and mathematical forms that confound reason, all quintessentially borderline themes.  Cusa employed the borderline experience of uncertainty, the betwixt and between of humanity, as the ultimate way of knowing.  Cusa’s god is the invisible source of the visible and he says, in classic borderline style “we are human precisely because we cannot see as we are seen”.  

The “neither this nor that” detachment in the borderline population requires an imaginal, paradoxical approach that recognizes and validates, in Schwartz-Salant’s terms, a “psychotic core” of ‘madness’ as being present, not just in the borderline patient, but in human nature.  The addressing of this mad, psychotic core with its demonic, fragmented alienation and despair is the stuff of mysticism, spirituality and religion.  The 16th century renaissance classic Dark Night of the Soul written by St. John of the Cross is an instance of this, and Schwartz-Salant further suggests that St. John was a borderline personality who performed a major religious function for his culture in his time.

According to a recent newsletter of the Institute of Consciousness Research, all St. John’s poems have as their subject mystical union with the divine.  He portrays the everyday world as a place of death and darkness, a quintessential borderline perspective.

This life I lead is only
A way of not living.
I die because I do not die

The borderline theme of alienation and abandonment is portrayed in John’s poetry.  The soul longs for God in this stanza

Where are you hiding,
Beloved, having left me to moan?
Like the stag, you fled
After wounding me.
I followed crying aloud, but
you had gone.

In John’s mystical poetry the return to source is via what he calls the “secret staircase”.  In classical borderline language, he refers to this journey as a purgation or purification of the soul, in which all attachments are cut, a paradoxical borderline statement of the means to attain complete union with the unmediated Divine.  The methodology for this union requires an emptying of oneself of all that is not God in order that one can be filled with the Holy Spirit.  This emptying of oneself is what St. John refers to as “the dark night of the soul”:

In the darkness of night,

With love and longing seized,…

I went abroad unnoticed,

All then being quiet in my house.

In safety, in the dark,…

In the dark stealthily…

Secretly, unseen by anybody,

Looking at nothing else,

With no other light or guide

Save that which was burning in my heart.

This light guided me

More certain than the light of midday,

To where one awaited me

Whom I knew well

In a place where no one would appear,

Oh night that was my guide,

Oh night dearer than dawn!

Oh night, that joined

Lover to beloved,

Transforming the bride into the lover!…

(suspending) every one of my senses.

I stayed, lost to myself,…

All endeavour ceased, I forgot myself,

And all my cares were left

Forgotten among the lilies.

As in the toxic womb experiences of patients I have worked with in my practice, John came to this mystical joy and union with the divine through horrific suffering.  A contemporary of Teresa of Avila, he joined her religious reform attempts and as a consequence was imprisoned in 1577.  The conditions were grim indeed.  His cell was unlit and he had no source of light, the ceiling was too low for him to stand up and the air was foul.  He was given bread and water along with sardine scraps thrown on the floor.  He was frequently whipped.  He became infested with lice and suffered from dysentery.  After six months of imprisonment John experienced a spontaneous mystical ecstasy that transformed him from a victimized sufferer to an ecstatic, lyric poet.  His biographer says “His cell became filled with a spiritual light that could be seen by the bodily eye and filled his soul with joy”.  From this day forward he became a poet unsurpassed in the Spanish language, speaking always of mystical union with the divine.

Schwartz-Salant suggests that the spiritual borderline tendency is also pervasive in late 20th century western culture and has required us to reacknowledge darkness, despair, fragmentation and voidness as irreducible aspects of our archetypal and human nature.  He suggests that we may look to myths, such as the Egyptian Isis/Osiris death and resurrection  motif, for ways to understand and integrate these experiences so that they become archetypal and human cultural evolution challenges, rather than just symptoms to be alleviated.  The spiritual borderline personality's attraction to spiritual traditions that involve ritual enactment, objectification, reestablishing a relationship with nature and skills for managing liminal, psychic "other world" experiences may be instructive for the culture as a whole.  Certainly for these individuals the coming to terms with their spiritual issues and aspirations through involvement in a tradition is a major step toward healing, particularly if this involves a naturally embodied experience of the numinous, as this permits the basic healing coniunctio, which supports the capacity for relatedness to other people and to the culture.  Transpersonal psychotherapy with its spiritual, existential embodiment themes may also fulfill this function.  

Thus from a transpersonal and archetypal perspective, the study and healing of individual and cultural borderline tendencies provides an evolutionary stimulus for our society in general, with specific relevance to the healing profession, the arts and spirituality."

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