Narcissist? Borderline? What Are We Dealing With Here?

One psychologist’s take on two(ish) personality disorders.

Maybe it’s because those of us here in the USA recently underwent a four-year intensive training course in personality disorders; maybe it’s because many of us are feeling pretty disordered in what seems to be the early middle of the COVID pandemic.

Or maybe we’ve just been exposing ourselves to too many vapid influencers who appear to be made of extensions, fillers, veneers, and knockoff jewelry.

I see the terms “narcissist” and “borderline” tossed around so much, I thought I’d throw my understanding of these personality types/disorders out there. While this is the stuff of encyclopedias, I think even a glimpse can inform.

My training as a psychologist was based pretty much on Object Relations Theory, a post-Freudian take on psychological development that actually thought to take into account the impact of actual people on our early years — and thus our personalities. Wait, don’t hang up yet.

I know Freud is out of favor. I know there are legit reasons why he should be. However, I want to cherry-pick some of his terms and concepts because I believe they are very useful in understanding Narcissistic and Borderline personalities.

It is also important to remember that Freud was a neurologist, and he claimed that one day all of this would be known to be physical. Long before we knew anything about neurotransmitters, long before PET scans and neural reprogramming, Freud said we would understand psychology as being physical in its basis.

Let me take you back to Intro Psych 101: ego, id, and superego. We don’t have to go dancing on the head of a pin and debate whether or not you are born with an ego. We don’t even have to determine whether this is physical or cosmic or what.

Let’s just use these terms as descriptive. A model.

Anyone who has ever lived with an infant or been an infant knows about the id. It is the hungry, needy, irrational, totally self-centered aspect of our psyche. It’s the stuff of dreams, of psychosis, of telling us that we get to keep the wallet we found in the office hallway. Not only do infants not have to care about anyone else, the really new ones don’t even know anyone else exists. It takes time to learn that the food comes from someone else.

We could go from here straight to Antisocial Personality Disorder, but that’s not what we’re here for.

The ego, a not-so-great translation of the German “Ich,” (and we’re not going to Bloomsbury right now either, no matter how fascinating we find that cast of characters), is roughly considered what we call the self.

Your ego is your rational self: the part that understands, thinks, reasons, speaks a language other people can understand, and all that stuff that makes life in the real world possible.

I like to think of the ego as a semi-permeable membrane. More about why later.

Your superego, long story short, is your conscience. We all know you were either helped to develop one, or not. Most of us had parents who taught us that we didn’t get to keep that bike just because we found it on somebody’s lawn. Most of us had parents who asked, “How would you feel if somebody did that to you?”

So not only do you not keep the wallet you found in the office hallway, you actually remember what it felt like when you lost your wallet, and you really want the person who lost their wallet to get it back. Rather than adulthood being a torturous slog, you genuinely come to like doing the right thing even if nobody will ever know. Because it’s the right thing to do.

That’s the top rung of the moral development ladder, but we’re not here for that. either.

OK.

In our little theoretical world here, developing your ego depends on an adequate level of empathy from your earliest caregivers. Winnicott would say they didn’t have to be perfect, just good enough. Caregivers who did their level best to understand what you needed, and provide it.

One of the many interesting things that can happen if this is lacking can be an ego that is way too permeable. Not as tightly woven as we need to function in the real world. What does this mean?

It means your id has way too much latitude.

Let me say right now that all things psychological exist on spectrums ranging from normal to severely far away from normal. We all need a little ego permeability, or we would have no imagination, no creativity, no sense of humor (because for something to be funny it has to be somewhat irrational, or irreverent, or off-key).

We would say we need to be able to “dip down” into our ids and still be able to come back up into ego world.

Not everyone can do that.

Although they can appear to believe they are the center of the universe, the fact is that people on the difficult end of the borderline and narcissistic ranges of functioning have extremely fragile egos. You can think of their lives as being one long battle to defend against being completely destroyed. They don’t always have the bandwidth to care about other people.

A person with borderline personality disorder has a very leaky ego indeed. This is why one of the main characteristics of the disorder is pervasive, overwhelming anxiety. Emotions are a tsunami and are not held in check by that fragile ego. With an extreme sensitivity to abandonment, any hint of being left creates an earthquake and subsequent flood of terror and rage.

For the severe narcissist, a major mobilizing factor in life is envy. Narcissists’ minds have very strange math. At bottom, it means that if anything good happens to anyone anywhere, this means there is less good for me. If you have happiness, there is less happiness in the universe for me. If you win something, I cannot possibly be genuinely happy for you because your winning means I am a loser.

Although such personalities can be notoriously difficult when we encounter them in other people, these are not psyches you would like to have running through your own head.

For those of you who haven’t fallen asleep yet, I want to say a few words about the psychological defense mechanisms employed by people in the borderline/narcissistic range.

See, defense mechanisms develop over time just like the rest of us. We start life with very primitive defenses, very black and white. Babies are cute as buttons but not very complex psychologically. Denial and projection rule the day. If emotions are too much, well, that thing did not happen. Or, I can project those overwhelming feelings out into the world and then everybody is out to destroy me, whether through abandonment or failure to love me enough.

A narcissist’s black and white is easy to observe and difficult to live with. It means you are either for me or against me. If you disagree with me, if you fail to see things exactly the way I see them, that is way more than my ego can handle; therefore I must “split you off” (a variety of black-and-white thinking). I won’t get mad at you; you will simply cease to exist for me.

I believe some people are born with fragile ego material. Not being a neuroscientist, I don’t know much about that. I do know that when mothers and infants are studied, an empathic response from the mother lights up areas in the infant’s brain. This allows me to say that sufficient empathy from your caregivers can help your tiny brain (and nascent ego) to develop well.

You can imagine (some of you know all too well) what it means to be born to people in the borderline/narcissistic range of functioning. Fortunately for many, other caregivers are available to help with the “good-enough” caregiving. If you’re low on the spectrum, you can develop the capacity for genuinely healing experiences and relationships.

While adults with severe borderline/narcissistic personalities can’t be “cured,” in my experience they can be helped if they are willing to attain an intellectual understanding of their psychological functioning and do the work to function better in the world. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy have been shown to be very helpful, but it takes work. In essence, you learn to have better control over your emotions, and how to act in ways that keep people close rather than driving them away.

That last bit is a central paradox for people in the borderline/narcissistic range of functioning: their psychology is one of social (and sometimes physical) self-destruction. Any successes they attain are insufficient because they are mere props and never enough to fill the void inside. A lifetime of longing for true relationship is out of reach because people are driven away by the bottomless need.

If you have one of these challenging psyches, or you live with someone who does, by all means read up on these personalities. If you live on the borderline/narcissistic spectrum, you can learn your emotional triggers and how to manage them more effectively.

If you live with someone on this spectrum, understanding the dynamics can help with not taking things too personally; not being drawn in by the potent vortex of the other person’s emotions; and with keeping your own healthy boundaries even when the other person can never understand why you are doing so. It may mean being eliminated from the other person’s life, but it may also be the only way to preserve your own.