In working with borderline patients, we often encounter a paradox:
the deepest longing for closeness suddenly shifts into
intense anxiety and destructive aggression
This contradiction arises from the fact that, due to their split world of internal object relations, borderline individuals experience love relationships in a fundamentally different way.
For borderline patients, love is an intense, all-encompassing affect in which the longing for fusion intertwines with fears of rejection, betrayal, total control, and humiliation. Their relationships become a constant battleground between idealization and persecution, between the yearning for union and the need for self-protection. All of this vividly reflects the inner drama of borderline patients:
the inability to sustain a cohesive image of the object
without splitting it into the “absolutely good” and the “absolutely bad.”
This dynamic is described in detail by Dr. Otto Kernberg, M.D., who, in his clinical and theoretical work, demonstrates that even less severely ill borderline patients may present the capacity for sexual excitement and erotic desire but suffer from the consequences of their pathology of internalized object relations. The splitting mechanisms of borderline personality organization divide the world of internal and external object relations into idealized and persecutory figures. They are capable, therefore, of idealizing relationships with “part objects.” These relationships, however, are fragile and forever at risk of being contaminated by “all-bad” aspects that may shift an ideal into a persecutory relationship.
The love relations of these patients may present erotic desire along with primitive idealization of the love object. What we find here is the development of intense love attachments, with primitive idealization and a somewhat more enduring nature than the transitory involvements of narcissistic patients. The counterpart of these idealizations is a tendency to abrupt, radical disappointment reactions, the transformation of the idealized object into a persecutory one, and disastrous relations with previously idealized objects. These cases typically show the most dramatic aggressive features in divorce proceedings.
Perhaps the most frequent type of this pathological relationship is displayed by women with infantile personalities and borderline personality organization, who cling desperately to men idealized so unrealistically that it is usually very difficult to get any accurate picture of these men from the patients’ descriptions. On the surface, such involvements resemble those of much better-integrated masochistic women who submit to idealized, sadistic men, but unrealistic, childlike idealization.
Based on his analysis of clinical presentations, Dr. Otto Kernberg identified several noticeable aspects of intense love relations in patients with borderline personality organization. First, they illustrate the full capacity for genital excitement and orgasm linked with a passionate commitment, showing that the development of “genital primacy” does not necessarily imply emotional maturity. In these patients, a certain integration seems to have taken the place of polymorphous perverse infantile sexuality and genital sexuality, in that they seem able to integrate aggression with love—that is, to recruit the aggressive, sadomasochistic components of infantile sexuality in the service of libidinal erotic gratification. This integration of sexual excitement and erotic desire occurs before the subject has the capacity for integrating aggressively invested and libidinally invested internalized object relations. Splitting of object relations (into idealized and persecutory ones) persists, and intense erotic idealization of idealized objects serves the function of denying the aggressive segment of internalized object relations and protecting the idealized relationship from contamination with aggression.
Borderline patients evince a capacity for a primitive kind of falling in love, characterized by an unrealistic idealization of the love object, whom they do not perceive in any depth. This kind of idealization differs from mature idealization and illustrates the developmental processes the mechanism of idealization undergoes before culminating in the normal idealization of falling in love.
Intense sexual experiences that idealize intimate relations may be used to deny intolerable ambivalence and protect the splitting of object relations. This process illustrates what might be called a premature oedipalization of preoedipal conflicts in many patients with borderline personality organization: highly neurotic but intense love affairs obscure the underlying incapacity to tolerate ambivalence. Clinically, in both genders, the activation of genital modes of interaction may serve as an attempt to escape from the frightening, frustrating relations centering on oral needs and dependency. It is as if an unconscious hope for oral gratification by means of sexual activity and for an ideal relationship different from the frustrating pregenital one with the mother fosters an escape into early sexualization of all relations.
Understanding the dynamics of love and aggression in borderline patients reveals not only the complexity of their inner world but also the profound human struggle between the longing for unity and the fear of annihilation.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy