What Is Borderline Personality Disorder?

Take our Borderline Personality Disorder Test

Find a therapist to treat BPD

At the borderline level, individuals have deficits in the sense of self.

Difficulties at the rapprochement phase lead to both neediness and rage.

These individuals use splitting as a characteristic defense mechanism.

Part 2 of a two-part series. Click here for part one, "How Borderline Personality Begins"

Whether the origins lie in rapprochement failure, overt trauma, or their interaction, the clinical consequences of borderline personality are consistent: not having a sense of a coherent self leads to pervasive difficulties as the child grows into adulthood. The inability to maintain an internalized view of others as both good and bad means that those in the person’s orbit are split into either an idealized or vilified other, and these splits can vacillate quickly, leaving the other feeling whiplash due to the rapidity of the changing view of them (Kernberg, 1975; Stern, Caligor, Hörz-Sagstetter, Clarkin, 2018). These adults experience a primary fear of abandonment, as a reflection of the internalized abandoning, rejecting, or neglectful mother, and yet they are furious at those close to them for all manner of disappointments, whether real or projections of childhood hurts. These patients are often full of rage that belongs to childhood and reflects the failure to integrate anger and love. The inevitable disappointments of imperfect others activate projections of the bad mother, and because of this tension between fear of abandonment and rage at loved ones, the experience becomes one of rapidly alternating clinging and hostility (Kernberg, 1975; Adler Buie, 1979).

This anger is sometimes felt to be too dangerous to express outwardly. Instead it can be expressed against the self – in behaviors such as restricted eating or binging and purging, self-harm or self-mutilation, suicide attempts, substance abuse, or sexual impulsivity – though some of these behaviors, particularly self-harm, may function less as self-punishment and more as self-soothing, resolving dissociated states through pain or releasing unbearable tension. Such behavior can create intense shame, which often rapidly converts to rage. For other individuals at the borderline level, rage is directed outwards towards others, and patients with a borderline organization and narcissistic or antisocial character traits can be perpetrators of sexual,........

© Psychology Today