Fragmented Selves: Temporality and Identity in Borderline Personality Disorder

Abstract

The concept of narrative identity implies a continuity of the personal past, present and future. This concept is essentially based on the capacity of persons to integrate contradictory aspects and tendencies into a coherent, overarching sense and view of themselves. In ‘mature’ neurotic disorders, this is only possible at the price of repression of important wishes and possibilities for personal development. Patients with borderline personality disorder lack the capacity to establish a coherent self-concept. Instead, they adopt what could be called a ‘post-modernist’ stance towards their life, switching from one present to the next and being totally identified with their present state of affect. Instead of repression, their means of defence consists in a temporal splitting of the self that excludes past and future as dimensions of object constancy, bonding, commitment, responsibility and guilt. The temporal fragmentation of the self avoids the necessity of tolerating the threatening ambiguity and uncertainty of interpersonal relationships. The price, however, consists in a chronic feeling of inner emptiness caused by the inability to integrate past and future into the present and thus to establish a coherent sense of identity. The paper outlines the concept of narrative identity and explores its disturbances in borderline personality disorder. Finally, the increasing prevalence of these disorders is linked to the development of a mainly externally driven, fragmented character in post-modern society.

Assessment of Autobiographical Memory Narratives in Psychotherapy with Borderline Personality Disorder: An exploratory study

“…Fuchs (2007) conceptualised BPD as a disorder of intersubjectivity with a fragmented self-narrative manifested in the typical clinical features of affect dysregulation, impulsivity, splitting of object relations, unstable relationships and chronic emptiness. According to Fonagy (2000), early experiences of lack of empathy or maltreatment by attachment figures impair the child's reflective capacities and sense of self when attachment representations are being formed.…”

Splitting of the Mind and Unconscious Dynamics

“…In this context, Kernberg also proposed a concept of the splitting of representations to characterize borderline patients in whom the self and others are viewed at a given time as either all good or all bad without anything between this good-bad dichotomy (Westen, 1991). This splitting leads to disability to integrate positive and negative aspects of the self and others into coherent perceptions and produces "contradictory view" that things or persons are black or white, good or bad etc., and something between these polarities seems to be impossible (Kernberg, 1975;Fuchs, 2007). These contradictory representations of the self create disturbances of the mind.…”

“…These contradictory representations of the self create disturbances of the mind. This splitting is based on a lack of higher-level of self-observational processes by which a person normally monitors ongoing thoughts for coherence and accuracy (Kernberg, 1975, Fuchs, 2007. As a consequence of some concepts and findings proposed by Kernberg, the defense mechanism of splitting has attained a special importance through conceptualization of borderline personality organization that had a significant influence on psychoanalytic understanding of splitting phenomena (Kernberg, 1975;Marmar & Horowitz, 1986).…”

“…Because of that splitting is used as a defensive action of idealization and devaluation, which in real life situations are experienced and remembered in the extreme as black or white (Glassman, 1986, Siegel, 2006. Although this defense mechanism of splitting manifests in all individuals under certain circumstances, when it occurs too frequently, it seriously disturbs integrative functions and "good and bad", "self and object", representations continue to exist in relatively isolated states (Glassman, 1986;Siegel, 2006;Fuchs, 2007).…”

Examining the Shared and Unique Features of Self-Concept Content and Structure in Borderline Personality Disorder and Depression

“…Using an ambulatorymonitoring technique, for example, Ebner-Priemer et al (2006) found that adults with BPD had a negative recall bias: they underestimated retrospective positive emotions and overestimated retrospective negative emotions. Given that an important feature of BPD is the unstable, fluctuating, volatile nature of the self-concept (Bender & Skodol, 2007;Fuchs, 2007), a more momentary, present-state measure of self-concept may have greater reliability and validity than a global one.…”