1
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)
-2The 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." (SchwartzSalant, 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.
-3Adolph 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
-4be 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
-5disembodiment. 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.
-6Samuel 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, selfdestructiveness 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
-7however 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 20 th 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
-8constructed 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 20 th
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 15 th 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.
-9According 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,
- 10 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
- 11 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.
DOCS\SPIRITUAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS of the Borderline