Suddenly Shy
Borderline after Sontag
In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag deconstructs the tendency within various cultures to apply metaphors to illness, and she traces the destructive impact of this tendency. As she writes, âAny important disease whose causality is murky and for which treatment is ineffectual tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread, corruption, decay, pollution, ennui, weakness, are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor.â
I want to think about this insight in relation to borderline personality disorder. Borderline is one such illness where its causal opacity lends it to metaphorical capture. The symptomatic expression of the illness in behavior pushes the metaphor in a severe direction, such that we arrive at the borderline as emotional predator or vampire of intimacy.
This notion was popularized, it seems, by a pop-psych book called Emotional Vampires. I know what youâre thinking - Isnât that the guy who wrote Dinosaur Brains? It is. A promotional description of the former:
âEmotional Vampires will help you cope effectively with the people in your life that confound you, confuse you, and seem to sap every ounce of your energy. Bestselling author Dr. Al Bernstein shows you how to recognize each vampire type--antisocial, histrionic, narcissists, obsessive-compulsives, paranoids--and deal with them effectively. He uses many examples from the latest news headlines, which will help you distinguish between the types and deepen your understanding of each one.
In response to the daily calls and emails ⌠Dr. Al Bernstein has added his advice for dealing with those emotional vampires who come in the shape of spouses and lovers, relatives, and children. Dr. Bernstein shows you how to deal with each vampire type and what you need to do to keep from getting drained.â
The problem with metaphors is often not what they bring to our attention but what they license, and even children fall under the permission structure created by this one.
Borderline personality disorder, as defined by the DSM, is roughly characterized by four kinds of instability: emotional, social, self-concept, and behavioral. Emotionally, the borderline experiences sudden and extreme mood shifts, recurring melancholy, loneliness, and shame. Socially, an extreme sensitivity to abandonment makes intimate bonds precarious; the strategies adopted to secure love often destabilize the very relationships being pursued. In terms of self-concept, they report feelings of hollowness and operate with a fragmented or disjointed narrative of identity. Behaviorally, they engage in self-harm, substance abuse, and suicide attempts, behaviors best understood as attempts to regulate a hyperactive nervous system.
BPD is associated with early childhood trauma, inconsistent caregiving, abuse, and neglect.
People with BPD are intense. They are sensitive. They are prone to act in ways that seem extreme to their social environment.
At the level of official culture, Sontag has been effective. Her prohibition of metaphor seems to have taken hold. The use of metaphors of the borderline personality as a vampire or predator is mostly absent from clinical, diagnostic, and institutional discourse. This does trickle down to non institutional language and culture, e.g. online forums, support groups, etc. What one sees in these communities is not so much the employment of metaphor to describe BPD, but BPD itself acting as a metaphor, a kind of bag of infinite holding where any abusive or bad relationship can be placed without argument.
Once Sontagâs point has been understood and digested by official discourse, the metaphor moves underground into places like Reddit forums. When a discourse moves underground, it becomes more isolated and extreme, in feedback loops that exclude voices which resist the hardening of a narrative. Online communities become breeding grounds for just-so stories that develop a kind of dangerous memetic virality in particular historical moments.
If you want to see the stabilization of a narrative regime around a disease, one interesting window into this phenomenon can be found at the subreddit BPD Loved Ones. Here you will find not mere venting, but the stabilization and hardening of a dehumanizing narrative.
The language is possessive: your person with BPD, my person with BPD, yours did this, mine did this. There is an ever-present âthey.â They think this way. They hurt me. They can never change. The person suffering from borderline is fundamentally, uncannily, other:
âI donât care what she is. I donât care if she ever feels remorse. I donât care what happens to her. She was always just a strangerâŚâ
First, diagnosis is invoked. The underlying logic of the discourse is such that diagnosis gives a sense of inevitability, but the exculpatory force of the diagnosis is withdrawn, and moral agency is smuggled back in. The disease is both real, in that it creates an inevitability of harm, and yet not real enough to mitigate against culpability for that harm.
What we find on BPD Loved Ones is not a support group in the normal therapeutic sense. In clinical language, a support group has to meet some minimal best practices.
Such spaces, in order to remain minimally therapeutic, must not structurally prohibit nuance, discourage self-implication, or bar counterexamples.
When these are forbidden, this is not a clinical support group. It is a folk ontology hardening into a hateful narrative regime.
***
When I think through the details of my own case in light of the broader literature on borderline, the following hypothesis occurs to me. Borderline is a condition which is constituted in the following way: There is a rupture in some important early relationship. Some form of withdrawal, neglect, abuse, or abandonment. And the child, if they are sensitive to meaning, responds by overdeveloping an interpretive capacity by which they attempt to make sense of what has happened. This inner tendency is amplified in environments where frank expressions of emotional sensitivity are met with punishment, mockery, or silence. This is a dangerous double burden: of meaning, and of silence.
In my own case, the logic was simple. My father disappeared and my mother did not want to talk about it. Or rather, if she did want to talk about it, it was from a place of deep anger and resentment. This creates a double burden: first, the burden of making meaning out of the absent, neglectful, or abusive parent, and second, a burden of silence imposed by the social environment through punishment, censure, or isolation for what are deemed excessive expressions of psychological pain.
The obsessive construction of narrative interpretation to situate oneself socially becomes an ongoing psychological need, now pushed inward, and denied opportunities for healthy expression.
The inner dialogue begins as compensation, and hardens into compulsion. This creates a relational style which is highly sensitive to signs of rupture, abandonment, or even devaluation. This intense relational style is often somewhere between semiotics and divination, and in turn puts an incredible burden on relationships. Interestingly, many people react to these strains and demands by retreating into ambiguity. Thus we have a negative feedback loop: excessive interpretive labor exhausts the social partner who retreats into ambiguity, restarting the process of interpretation. Furthermore, this exhaustive inner narrative keeps the self under construction, such that no long term stable self seems to emerge.
In the clinical literature we see a wide range of behaviors associated with the borderline diagnosis. This view explains why. Because external behavior, and relational patterns themselves, are downstream from the real causal mechanism - a runaway inner narration of meaning. Thus, we see the same inner logic expressed differently according to different configurations of: introversion/extroversion, high/low inhibitions, emotional literacy, etc.
The folk ontology that treats borderline as quasi-demonic collapses root cause with one of its many effects.
The value of this perspective is that it allows us to understand borderline not as inherently malicious or manipulative, but as burdened with a tragic hyperdevelopment of something fundamentally human: the instinct to insulate oneself from loss and pain through narrative and interpretation, i.e. meaning.
So normally, a metaphor works like this. We have the tenor, which is the thing we are talking about, and the vehicle, which is the image or idea we borrow to talk about the tenor. Meaning flows from the vehicle onto the tenor. In Sontagâs case of tuberculosis or cancer, the tenor is the illness and the vehicle is some moral, political, or military idea: repression, corruption, invasion, punishment. Even when the metaphor is harmful, the illness remains conceptually downstream. It is the illness that is stigmatized by the metaphor.
With personality disorders, something different begins to happen. Instead of metaphors applying to the disease, the disease becomes the metaphor itself. It becomes the vehicle rather than the tenor. It becomes an abstract container where cruelty, manipulation, emotional harm, and social rupture are identified with the label. The label explains far too much.
There is an ethical and ontological slide. If BPD is real, then the harm it produces in relationships can be understood as symptoms of emotional dysregulation. This does not eliminate moral condemnation, but it gives it limits. If BPD is not real, what remains is intentional, characterological choice, something for which blame is not only allowed, but required.
The culture toggles between these two positions. It employs a strategy of ontological instability. The illness is neither fully real nor unreal. In the double movement of applying and retracting the medicalized label, we are left with the residue of pure stigma.
***
Iris Murdoch, in the Sovereignty of the Concept of the Good, makes the case for the necessity of metaphor:
â...we are creatures who use irreplaceable metaphors in many of our most important activities.â
At minimum, Murdoch makes a strong case for the indispensability of metaphor as a tool of cognition. I donât think Sontag is really at odds with this. It seems to me that Sontag is concerned with the creation of mythologies around illness which hinder proper understanding and treatment. Murdoch is corrective: What we need is not a purely mechanical medical language but also better and truer metaphors, which illuminate more than they obscure. I want to turn now to art for better metaphors.
***
I want to return to Joanna Newsom as a phenomenological poet. The experience of Newsomâs lyrics shows the way in which the poet doesnât merely replicate their own phenomenology, but creates a kind of instrument for the reader to explore the depths of their own inner life.
Here I want to look at Peach, Plum, Pear through the lens of borderline personality.
âWe speak in the store.
Iâm a sensitive bore.
You seem markedly more,
And Iâm oozing surprise.â
For me, this is a classic borderline scenario. âWe speak in the store, and Iâm a sensitive bore.â She is aware of her sensitivity and aware of its psychological cost on others. Her neurotic self-awareness is overcome by an encounter with the lover, who has some kind of excess, which is experienced as a release. Sheâs oozing surprise. Itâs leaking, itâs uncontrollable, her boundaries are breaking apart, which is a radical state of being for a mundane setting.
After this stage of attunement, we have an abrupt, disorienting withdrawal.
âBut itâs late in the day
And youâre well on your way.
What was golden went gray
And Iâm suddenly shy.â
Thereâs no rejection here, only the anticipation of such. The shift from golden to gray is a phenomenological shift. âSuddenly shyâ is the self whisked away by some strange psychic movement. If this were well understood on its own, this sudden shyness, itâs absolute inner authority, this would go some way toward shedding a sympathetic light on borderline as a condition.
This relational pattern forms a kind of mania of meaning, a burst of intellectual activity to decode the logic of relationships so that one can live inside them.
âAnd I have read the right books
To interpret your looks.
You were knocking me down
With the palm of your eye.â
***
âAnd we were galloping manic
To the mouth of the source.
We were swallowing panic
In the face of its force.â
A rushing momentum toward a fantasy of deep reunion, of home. There is desperate resolve here to hold on to the beloved, like holding onto a wild, galloping animal as you try to make your way home.
âAnd I am blue,
⌠and unwell.â
I can only tell you here, where language begins to fail me, that Iâm not well. The sum of what Iâve described, my experience, is making me sick.
âMade me bolt like a horse.â