Three Characters by Christopher Bollas;

Author:Christopher Bollas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ISD Distribution

Motivation for help

Ultimately, the motive for this difficult transformation from borderline intimacy to self containment and new object relatedness is borderline pain. The self’s stormy entanglement with the world does not result in discovery of the object-mother. Struggle after struggle, wasted relation after wasted relation, do not produce mutual psychic perception. The borderline self lives in a world of fragments, violently saturated with an in-mix of the emotional furies of self and other. As time passes, mental anguish increases. All along there has been an unconscious wish that as long as the self remains attached to the environment-object, eventually the object-mother will emerge and the storm will end. Finally she will be there, ready to help, providing creative objects and introducing the self to generative intimacy.

Borderline relations are consoling as they offer the traces of a relationship, but ultimately they exhaust the couple and lead to unbearable mental pain. To protect the self against the unbearable, the borderline splits the self and the object, projecting the idealised and the despised parts into different containers. Her calm, functioning self may come to the fore when she experiences an object as benign—when she is out shopping, perhaps, or chatting with the postman, or doing tasks at work. These relations relieve her temporarily of the feeling that she is being tossed about at sea. But these are shallow connections that lack depth because their primary purpose is to provide relational forms of asylum. The borderline cannot sustain this sort of split with anyone who is close, or in a situation where there is conflict.

Most of the objects in the borderline universe are bad objects, often the detritus of actual conflicts in lived experience with primary others. The residue of such strife must be contained somewhere, and if the memory leads to too much mental anguish it will be displaced into some bad object or other. So let’s imagine that Ben is suffering unbearable memories of the slings and arrows cast his way by Penny and he has reached the point of not being able to bear the agony of these memories. He might unconsciously displace Penny by becoming obsessed with the evils of American foreign policy in Iraq, or with global warming. His psychoanalyst, following his lines of thought, might see that Ben has projected the conflict with Penny into another arena, and by doing so has removed the self from a situation that is existentially more unbearable.

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