Borderline Personality

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Thu Mar 7 10:06:06 PST 2002


On Wed, Mar 6, 2002, Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema wrote:


> The psychoanalytic literature on Borderline Personality is very
> interesting, and calls for a political interpretation, mostly because it
> captures the details of advanced degeneration of the bourgeois ego.
> Just as the Frankfurt School appropriated the psychoanalytic thought of
> 75 years ago in a fruitful way, we need to do the same now. Much of the
> change in social reality has led to fundamental shifts in family
> relationships, with corresponding changes in the nature of oedipality.

I believe the heyday of the borderline personality idea was the late 70s. As I remember it, the idea always had most of its success as a political diagnosis. It was essentially the left way of condemning the Me Decade.

The basic argument was that contemporary bureaucratic-consumerist society had led to a new kind of weaker and more infantile (aka "pre-oedipal") personality type, where the capitalism of small farmers and entrepreneurs and stable two-parent families had previously given rise to autonomous (aka "oedipal") individuals. Proponents said that the old setup gave rise to sharply defined oedipal crises and clear resolutions of same, which resulted in a personality with strong oepidal structures, where the new situation was more amorphous on all fronts, and led to a lack of crisis, a lack of resolution and a weakly structured personality. (And that this was a bad thing, where just a few years previously, softening and loosening up had been considered virtues when it came to the self. Rigid structures and strong boundaries were considered bad things for the self to have in the late 60s. They led to inability to show affection, a proneness to heart attacks and a rage to make Strangelovian war.) I think the gist of the preoedipal argument was that the preoedipal personality had a difficult time formulating its desires, and such inarticulate desires were difficult to satisfy and easy to manipulate. Preoedipal types were supposed to be inherently dependant and frustrated, a lot like infants they were modelled on.

The evidence that this transformation had occurred was supposed to be that psychoanalysts were seeing fewer and few of the classical complexes in their practice -- they didn't seem to make hysterics like they used to, talking in tongues and going blind. Instead they were seeing much fuzzier complaints that were less amenable to breakthroughs, like failure to commit or find true intimacy.

This argument was not only made for Frankfurt analysis, it largely came out of it. The most famous and successful version by someone who considered himself something of a Frankfurter was Christopher Lasch's _The Culture of Narcissism_. (The "narcissistic personality" was originally a synonym for the borderline personality, although that led to some confusion with the narcissis complex). The most sophisticated and explicitly Frankfurterian was probably an article by Joel Kovel in the journal _Telos_ that I think was called "Rationalization and the Family" and came out around the same time.

The term itself seems to have had the usual popular vogue of around a decade. But the underlying argument that the new generation is immature, where back in the old days we had real adults, has reappeared in many guises and will probably return again soon.

Michael



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