Borderline’s False Self Unlike Narcissist’s (see PINNED COMMENT)

The psychoanalyst Grossstein suggested that borderline personality disorder is a form of failed narcissistic personality disorder.

The borderline as a child is on its way to develop all the narcissistic defenses and constructs. For example, the false self, and then for some reason, fails and remains stuck in a state of emotional dysregulation.

So clearly everyone agrees that there is an intimate connection between borderline personality disorder and narcissistic disturbances of the self.

And this is the topic of today's video, the role of the false self in borderline personality disorder.

And apropos, borderline personality disorder.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. You haven't heard this one in a while. And a professor of clinical psychology.

The false self in the borderline disorder or the borderline personality organization is very different to the false self in narcissism.

The borderline does have a false self, but it fulfills different roles and functions to the narcissist's false self.

One main difference is that in borderline personality organization, and more precisely in borderline disorders of the personality, the false self coexists with a relatively functional true self.

Now this is not the case in narcissism.

In narcissistic personality disorder, the true self is deactivated, disabled, atrophied, and utterly dysfunctional.

In borderline personality disorder, the true self is there. It's less active than the false self, or more precisely, it's active cyclically and periodically, and it is respondent or reactive to changes in the environment.

And the fact that there are two competing selves, a false self and a true self, creates, of course, dissonance, internal conflict, and this conflict leads to emotional dysregulation and a panoply of other clinical features of borderline personality disorder as we shall see.

Now before we proceed the false self is not an ontological entity it's not a real thing it's not like this coffee mug. It's not something you could capture, talk to make friends with, study in a laboratory or in prison.

The false self is an obstruction, an organizing principle.

To understand what is the false self, think about the concept of justice in the so-called justice system.

No one has ever captured justice in a bottle. You cannot buy and sell justice.

Well, you can buy justice.

But what I mean to say, justice is not a true physical, solid, material entity.

Justice is an organizing principle. Justice is a hermeneutic principle. It makes sense of certain processes.

It's the same with the false self.

The false self is a metaphor.

Okay? Got it? Exactly like the ego or the id or the superego or the true self. All these concoctions. They are just ways to describe what's happening in the mind and the brain of people, in the minds and brains of people.

So borderline personality disorder.

I want to read to you a very short excerpt about the internal experience of the borderline.

It's from the book, BPD Journals by Edwards.

Says, sometimes now more than ever, I feel like a ghost, masquerading as a human being, trying to fool people into thinking that it is alive.

This play is getting towards the end when the curtains close and the ghost is thrown back into non-existence.

The ghost should have seen that it can only act for so long until people catch on.

So this is the internal experience of the borderline, one way of describing them.

Borderline personality disorder involves many clinical features. It is a very heterogeneous mental illness.

And one of the main, one of the key elements is known as identity diffusion or more precisely clinically speaking identity disturbance not experiencing the self not experiencing this continuity.

Life as a no one, a non-entity, life as nothingness in the bad sense of the word. Life is withdrawal of the self.

There's no cathexis in the self. There's no emotional investment in this core identity that is I or you.

Borderline, therefore, is a kind of mask. It's a persona. It's a fake. It is an impulsive attempt to fill in or to counter or to distract from the emptiness or the absence inside.

So the borderline tries on a variety of identities the same way actors change costumes in the theater.

And the aim of doing this is in order to forget about the shame, the pain, the hurt, the threat, the emptiness.

You could ask, who is doing the feeling? Who is it who is experiencing the shame and the pain?

And this is why I say that in borderline personality disorder, the true self has survived. The narcissistic defenses have not destroyed the true self. And there is a competition between false and true selves.

So the borderline experiments with different identities. And this way, she or he, half of all borderlines are men, they engender unpredictable outcomes.

When you try on kaleidoscopically, a variety of ways of not being yourself.

Because healthy normal people, they try to be themselves. Borderlines try to not be themselves. They assume identities, usually from other people. We'll discuss it in a minute, that's a form of external regulation.

But when they do this, when they try on roles, when they try on other people's identities as their own, when they appropriate these identities, this creates utterly unpredictable outcomes.

Borderlines, therefore, are actually obsessed with finding an organizing narrative.

The key, the core question in borderline personality disorder asked by each and every patient is, who am I? Tell me who am I.

I cannot answer this question. Only you can. You, my therapist. You, my intimate partner. You, society, you.

Identity is acquired in the borderline condition from the outside. It is imported.

It's the same in healthy and normal people initially. Input from the outside helps to shape the identity, but then there are auto-constitutive processes, internal processes that take over the identity formation.

Not so in borderline. Borderlines remain all the time on the surface. They cannot go deep, perhaps, because it's terrifying there. They cannot get in touch with their core identity because there's none.

This emptiness, this howling void, this black hole threatens to consume them all the time.

So they remain on the surface.

And that's very, very ironic because people with borderline personality disorder have no surface. They have no skin. They have no firewall. Nothing isolates them and protects them from the harshness and abrasiveness of a wounding and hurtful reality.

And so it is this very attempt to run away from, to avoid, to evade, to escape the internal space, by exiting onto an external space, this very attempt leads the borderline to her greatest torments and agonies.

Because when she flees, when she runs away from the internal space and positions herself on the external space, on the surface, it is then that she comes face to face with reality in a direct unmediated manner, and the pain is huge.

So in the case of borderline personality disorder or even borderline personality organization, instead of a failed external constitution of the true self, or in addition to the failed external constitution of the true self, there is external regulation.

Allow me to explain this.

The borderline tries to constitute herself, to recreate herself on the fly, to generate or regenerate herself like lizards do when you cut off the tail. She tries to regenerate herself by reverting to the outside, by trying to import input and feedback and relationships and contacts and connections with the outside.

And so this attempt fails. There is a failure of external constitution of the true self via interactions with other people.

If we use the language of self psychology, we could say that the borderline constantly fails to generate or to interact with self objects, one of them being the mother.

And so there is this failure, the borderline tries desperately to somehow cement and augment and hold together a true self, which would take care of everything, organize everything, explain everything, drive everything forward, provide a vision, make sense, regulate emotions, stabilize labil moods, anything. And she tries to create this, to mold it like a sculpture based on input from the outside, from other people, and she keeps failing.

So what she does instead, the borderline, and again, half of all borderlines are men. So what the borderline does instead she says I cannot render myself, I cannot become, I cannot acquire existence and ontology via the agency and the participation of other people. Other people, interacting with other people, is useless. It doesn't help me to become me. I cannot create a core identity and a self via object relations, via relationships with other people.

So instead what I'm going to do, says the borderline. Instead, I'm going to take my mind as it is, and I'm going to hand it over. I'm going to outsource my internal functionality and processes. I'm going to outsource my ego functions. I'm going to outsource psychological processes. I'm going to outsource my sense of safety and security, the secure base function. I'm going to outsource everything. I'm going to let someone else take care of my mind. I'm going to let someone else become my identity. I'm going to let someone else take care of my mind. I'm going to let someone else become my identity. I'm going to let someone else make sense of who I am. I'm going to let someone else's gaze mold me and shape me and demarcate my contours. I'm going to see myself becoming through someone else's gaze.

And in this sense, external regulation is common in both borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.

And both of them, the narcissists and the border, borderline regulate externally via the agency of the false self.

However there are major differences we will discuss them.

I mentioned one of them in the case of the borderline the true self exists, the true self reasserts itself. The true self competes with the false self. The true self is unhappy with the false self. The true self is the seat of guilt, the seat of shame. It is the true self that pushes the borderline to realize that something is wrong with her. Something is wrong with her false self.

The narcissist has none of this. The narcissist is egosyntonic when it comes to the false self. The narcissist is the false self. There's not daylight in the case of narcissism between the narcissist and his false self. That's not the case. That's not how it is in borderline personality disorder.

Additionally, the borderline's false self is a manipulative, codependent false self. It's a false self that is engaged in control from the bottom. It's a false self that is Machiavellian in the sense that the borderline's false self intends to secure, is hell-bent on securing someone to regulate the borderline externally, a special person, an intimate partner, a maternal figure. So the borderline's false self is goal oriented. The borderline's false self is limited to the function of securing external regulation, usually an intimate partner.

While the narcissist's false self is a full substitute to the ego and to a functioning constellated integrated self. The narcissist doesn't have any other self but the false self.

And if this sounds religious, it's because narcissism is a private religion.

So the narcissist's false self is in charge of all functions, reality testing, self-preservation, body perception, and you name it, it's done, it's mediated. The locus is in the narcissist's false self.

That's absolutely not the case in borderline personality disorder.

And the borderline's attempts to emerge, like Venus, Botticelli's Venus, to emerge, to become, through the gaze of others, because she can't do it internally, and because she fails to create herself by interacting with other people, so she hands over the reins of control to someone else, external locus of control.

But that's where it ends. Her impulsivity, her instability, her identity diffusion and disturbance come to an end when she finds a competent, willing external regulator until other dynamics come into play, the twin anxieties, abandonment anxiety and engulfment anxiety, and she ditches the external regulator and the cycle starts all over again.

There's no period in the narcissistic life except immediately after mortification. But there's no other period in narcissistic life where the false self is suspended or inactive, no such thing.

And so this, in the borderlines case, the false self is an attempt to cope with emptiness.

In the narcissists' life, the false self is an attempt to become godlike.

The narcissists' false self is about control and avoidance of hurt, pain aversion.

The borderline's false self is about experiencing some form of existence, however vicarious.

Okay, so she is fighting her emptiness, her inner emptiness, her sense of absence.

And so, borderlines recreate themselves on the fly, and it makes them feel inauthentic, as if they're pretending, it's a pretend play.

The process of external regulation in the case of the borderline involves grandiose fantasies.

And they recreate themselves on the fly because they distrust reality to do it for them.

This is Helene Deutsch's as if personality. This as if personality.

It's as if the borderline says, I don't trust reality to help me to recreate myself. And I don't trust reality because I don't, maybe I'm not doing it right, or maybe I don't know how to do it, or maybe I am constitutionally incapable of doing it. Or maybe if I'm a narcissistic borderline, it's reality's fault, a maladaptive defense.

This kind of borderline, the narcissistic borderline, blames reality, the environment, circumstances, situations, other people.

Okay, be that as it may, reality is not working for the borderline.

Because reality is not working for the borderline, there is no stable, continuous, contiguous identity.

It's as if every morning the borderline wakes up and she's a different person, or she at least has to reinvent herself, to recreate herself, to remember herself, to recall herself, putting together disparate elements and coming up with a pseudo solution, a quasi-solution.

That probably is me. I'm not quite sure. I have vague memories of who I am, but I think that's me.

And then she hands over these functions to an external regulator.

But she does not perceive the external regulator as a part of reality.

Remember, the borderline has been betrayed by reality. The borderline has been let down by her own inability to derive value from reality, to allow reality to help her to become, so she has given up on reality. Reality is the enemy, reality is hostile, or in the best case, reality is useless.

Instead, she chooses another person to help her to be herself, to help her to discover her self, and if necessary, to help her to constitute a self, even if it is a false self.

And this person, the intimate partner, the special friend, whatever, this person is not a part of reality. He is immersed and embedded with a borderline in a shared fantasy.

I told you, this process of recreation involves grandiose fantasies, and it is a shared fantasy, exactly like the narcissists.

But in the narcissistic shared fantasy, the purpose is to maintain the grandiose or the cognitive distortion of grandiosity.

In other words, the aim of the shared fantasy, in the case of the narcissist, is to uphold andof the shared fantasy, in the case of the narcissist, is to uphold and buttress and affirm and confirm a narrative with the narcissist is Godlike, a perfect entity, whereas the aim of the shared fantasy in borderline personality disorder is to provide an environment where another person is fully empowered and able to help the borderline to become, time and again, again, as many times as necessary.

It is the other person's love that guarantees the longevity of this process. It is the other person's love that provides a secure base.

In other words, the other person fulfills a maternal function. The other person is mother.

This is why borderlines fall for narcissists, because narcissists are into dual mothership. You will be my mother, and I will be your mother as well.

So narcissists offer the borderline, a perfect solution, a package deal. I will regulate you externally and I will act as your mother, on condition that you repay your debt by becoming my mother.

The narcissistic shared fantasy seamlessly integrates with the borderline's shared fantasy, although they have different agendas, completely different agendas.

The borderline aggrandizes the narcissists, caters to the narcissistic's psychological needs of external regulation, upholds the narcissist's grandiosity, provides narcissistic supply because the narcissist gives her what she needs. External regulation. A sense of identity. Identity through someone else's gaze. She sees herself. Through his gaze, for the first time, she actually sees herself. And if she is reflected in someone else's gaze, it must mean that she does exist. And there's a sense of existence.

As I said, the borderline is a problem in generating self-objects.

Self-object is any narcissistic experience in which the other person is in the service of the self.

And the self becomes through this, through the narcissistic self-objects. By being serviced, when other people service the self, the self is able to perceive the separateness of these other people and is able to become.

So the self is a structure that accounts for the experience of continuity, coherence and well-being. It is a source of narcissistic feeling.

This is the irony in borderline and in narcissism. The self is absent. Its formation has been disrupted.

The borderline is perhaps biologically, genetically, cerebrally, brainwise, incapable of generating a self.

With the case of the narcissists at this stage we believe that it is environmentally induced. The disruption in the formation of the self is a result of abuse, trauma and adversity in early childhood.

Fuchs suggested that people with borderline personality disorder are only what they are experiencing at this moment, in an often intense and yet empty and flat present.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual goes deeper into describing this emptiness. It says that the sense of emptiness in borderline personality disorder, these feelings of emptiness have to do with a sense of non-existence, shifting views of oneself, rapid changes in roles, values, goals, and relationships, no clear concept of self-development, feelings of painful incoherence, the development of a false self, yes, it's in the DSM, and symptoms of derealization and depersonalization, dissociative processes, which we'll discuss in a minute.

In an article titled Personal Identity and Narrativity in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Phenomenological Reconfiguration, the authors say, and you can find it in the literature, in the description of the video and the literature.

The authors of the articles say, perhaps one of the most common experiences reported by people with borderline personality disorder is a sense of emptiness.

This emptiness, which has nothing to do with a form of freedom or casualness, is experienced as a weight that pulls the self down and takes on several determinations.

The sense of emptiness is lived as a feeling of internal balance, an absence, an impression of deadness, nothingness, a void feeling swallowed, a sense of vagueness, an internal hole or vacuum, a loneliness, an impression of woodenness, and numbness and alienation.

Not pleasant.

The false self is a dynamic, primary process, but it is also conscious and secondary, so in the borderline the false self is both conscious and unconscious. It is conscious as a defense, it is conscious as a role, and that's why the borderline feels that she is an imposter, that she is a fake, this is inauthentic and unreal.

But at the same time, exactly like in narcissism, the false self is unconscious. And it generates streams of what Freud used to call primary and secondary processes.

And because both processes emanate from the same construct, they can and often do create dissonance or conflict. A similar thing happens with the ego in Freud's work.

Borderlines are capable of lying. They're capable of gaslighting, exactly like psychopaths.

Because unlike narcissists, borderlines can tell the differences between fantasy and reality.

But of course, as I said, this gives rise to the feeling that they are deceiving people.

Living via other people, experiencing other people's lives rather than your own, assuming the identities of other people, like a chameleon, leads to chronic feelings of incoherence, inauthenticity, guilt, estrangement or self-estrangement, terror, vagueness, uncertainty, helplessness, and stasis, in other words, a lack of development and growth.

I would like to dwell on two issues here or two manifestations.

Clearly, the borderline solution is dysfunctional, it's self-defeating and very often self-destructive.

The borderline solution is I don't exist except through the agency of another person chosen by me, and chosen by me to participate in my fantasy. That's the only situation where I feel alive.

And so there is, it involves a lot of dissociative processes.

The borderline denies her fragmented self. She distances herself from herself in three ways.

Amnesia, forgetting things, memory gaps, derealization, feeling that the environment is unreal, and depersonalization, the feeling that the borderline herself is unreal.

And at the same time, the borderline catastrophizes because all this enhances uncertainty, reduces the functionality of an internal secure base, an internalized secure base, creates indeterminacy.

And so this unpredictability leads to catastrophizing, especially the catastrophizing of perceived or imaginary or anticipated abandonment.

The borderline says nothing is safe because I'm not sure that anything exists. I'm so dependent on someone else for my existence that if he were to pull the plug, I would cease to exist.

Hence the terror of abandonment, the separation anxiety.

And still, this gives the impression that borderline personality disorder is a kind of psychosis.

It is not.

Kernberg suggested that borderline personality organization is on the verge of psychosis. But even he did not imply that it is full-fledged psychosis.

Modern studies demonstrate the powerful connection between dissociative identity disorder and borderline personality disorder. And I have various videos dedicated to these issueson the playlist, borderline personality disorder rediscovered.

But it's not psychosis.

Because in psychotic disorders, there is a diminished self-affection. There is a rejection of the self.

Now the borderline goes through phases of egodystony. Very often she hates herself, she feels guilty and ashamed and so and so forth.

But there's no blanket rejection of the self. On the very contrary, there's a desperate, repeated attempt, recurrent attempt, to reinvent the self, to rediscover the self, to recreate and regenerate the self, to foster the self, and gender it via the agency of the external regulator.

In psychosis, there is hyper-reflexivity. That's not the case in borderline personality disorder.

Borderlines are capable of telling the difference between external and internal objects, much more so than narcissists, by the way.

And in psychosis, there is a disturbance when it comes to the experiential or perceptual field, this lack of grip or lack of hold on the experiential or perceptual field, which manifests sometimes in the form of hallucinations.

That's not the case with borderline.

Although borderlines, exactly like narcissists, subject to stress and strain and tension and abandonment and anxiety, can and do undergo psychotic micro-episodes. They have limited period of time, minutes, hours, maximum three, four days, where they become clinically psychotic.

Back to the false self.

The false self is a systemic construct.

Because it is a systemic construct, it competes with all other systemic constructs, including the true self. It competes for scarce mental psychological resources, what Freud used to call psychic energy or cathexis.

But cathexis is just the outer manifestation of multiple mental and psychological resources available to the internal constructs.

The false self monopolizes all the optimal and maximal resources.

In other words, if the borderline has an advantage of some kind, for example, she's highly intelligent, the false self will co-opt her intelligence, will monopolize her intellect, will inhabit it, a bit like demon possession. So he will take over her intellect.

If she is drop dead gorgeous, the false self will latch onto her looks, will leverage her looks.

So the false self is there. It's very brutal, it's very aggressive, he's unboundaried, and it takes over, it metastasizes, like cancer, it takes over, it metastasizes like cancer, it takes over resources, especially resources which provide with some kind of competitive advantage, evolutionary advantage, or otherwise social advantage, anything that provides advantage the false self zooms in, homes in on it, and absconds with it and confiscates it and appropriates it.

At the same time, the false self suppresses, represses or even reframes suboptimal resources.

For example, psychosomatic resources, sensory motor resources.

So let's take a case of a borderline who is super intelligent, but not very good looking. The full self will take over the intellect of this kind of person, this kind of borderline, and we leverage it and use it in order to captivate sources of external regulation.

At the same time, the false self will deny this borderline's body because it does not afford any competitive advantage. It's not unique. It's not arousing. It's not special.

Sothe false self, therefore, reallocates cathexis, reallocates emotional investment and juggles resources in order to maximize the outcome for self, aspires to maximal self-efficacy, not to optimal self-efficacy. It doesn't optimize, it doesn't optimize the false self, it maximizes.

This, of course, has a price. There's an internal cost. It creates a disconnect, a dissociation between the two classes of resources. The maximal resources and the suboptimal resources.

The false self breaks them apart, creates a schism, cleavage between them.

And this does not allow an identity to emerge.

Because a healthy identity is integrative. It integrates all the resources.

If you have a super intellect but an ugly body, your healthy identity would comprise both, would take both into account. They would both be elements of your healthy core identity, not so in borderline personality disorder and not so in narcissistic personality disorder.

The false self is discriminating. It hates and suppresses the less than optimal, less than maximal resources, traits, qualities, and emphasizes and aggrandizes and highlights the optimal and maximal resources.

And this, of course, creates dissociation and creates a lack of coherent cohesive identity.

At the same time in borderline personality disorder, the true self is still alive. It's not the case in narcissism, where the true self is dead, functionally at least.

In borderline, the true self is still alive. It feels real. It is creative.

The false self, on the other hand, is not real. It's fantasy-based, and it tends to regurgitate material. It's not very creative.

But often the false self regards the true self as a maximum resource so it tries to hijack the true self, to co-opt it, to take over, a hostile takeover, to merge with it, to fuse with it, to somehow control.

And this creates a war inside the borderline.

So you could see a false self in the borderline with glimpses of creativity.

It's a bad sign, actually.

It means that the takeover of the false self, the false self is taking over the true self and it is advanced already.

The false self is capable of using the true self's resources, including its creativity.

Whenever the false self exhibits traits, characteristics that are typical of the true self, it's a bad sign. It means the true self is being subsumed into the false self. It's being digested by the false self and assimilated by it.

Jorgensen wrote in 2006, the false self is an attempt to organize and stabilize the self.

Fuchs in 2007 wrote about fragmented selves. He used what is known as narrative theory. I have a video on this channel dedicated to narrative theory in personality disorder.

But Fuchs was a proponent of narrative theory. It suggested that there is a fragmentation of narrative identity.

In other words, there's a lack of integration between past experiences, present experiences, and future visions and expectations and imagination. This lack of integration creates fragmentation.

There's a focus on the present with an inability to put together or to glue together past experiences to create a pastiche or collage of past experiences and visions of the future and present experience.

And this is because the borderline is impulsive. She is dissociated and she is fractionated.

Using another terminology created by Gold and Karyotou, the borderline is episodic. She is not diachronic.

In other words, she's comprised of multiple episodes, like stills. She's not a video. She's a combination of snapshots, but she's not a video.

Diachronic means across time. There's no time dimension in pathological narcissism and borderline personality disorder.

As I said, narrative identity can be defined as the internalized and evolving story of self that a person constructs to make sense of their life.

The story behind narrative identity consists in a selective reconstruction of one's personal past and anticipations of their future that provide human life with a unity in time.

Of course, there are pitfalls and fallacies in this view because there is no narrative without identity.

Narrative is created by one's identity, and the identity creates narratives in order to maintain a sense of diachronic unity and cohesiveness.

In order to get to know itself, in order to discover itself, the narrative is a tool of self-exploration.

And at the same time, the narrative is the glue that holds the identity together. It's cohesiveness, provides its cohesiveness.

But it is the identity that creates a narrative.

There is no self-knowledge or self-discovery without an antecedent self, without a previous self.

It is the self that creates these processes.

Gold and Karyotou described the self as an intra-personal team reasoner.

I would like to read you a description of what they've written.

According to this non-narrative model, each person is composed of a team of transient agents who are necessarily episodic and have their own projects and temporalities.

Agents offer identity coherence to the self when they identify with a team through intrapersonal team reasoning, which consists in answering the question, what do I as a person, as a team, over time, want?

What actions should the present self take to accomplish this vision?

Consider the example of a studious agent who wants to pass an academic test the following week.

And at the same time, there's a sporty, athletic agent who plans to train daily.

These two agents within the mind belong to different timeframes and they share incompatible interests and goals.

Nevertheless, they do not jeopardize the temporal coherence of their self. They identify with a team and they share a common vision of the future self at the cost of abandoning goals such as certain training sessions or even personality traits.

The coherence achieved is thus not a matter of narrative unity between past and future experience, but rather of the ability to act in pursuit of projects that extend over time with the other transient agents, collaboration.

According to Golden and Karras, individuals with BPD suffer from a lack of identification and a lack of sense of continuity between transient agents, thus affecting the continuity between their goals, projects and ambitions over time and the coherence and cohesiveness of the team.

Of course, what Golden and Karras fail to see is that the team itself is the self-narrative. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggested it much earlier.

However, do the various agents know that they belong to the same team? How do they know this? Who told them?

It's a question that is unanswered in psychology. Who is coordinating all these processes? Chicken and egg.

These processes gave rise to identity. But if they give rise to identity, who or what is giving rise to these processes?

It seems that only an identity, a kind of self, can generate these processes, which then generate the self.

It's a very problematic issue and there are various proposed solutions and so on so forth.

But what's clear is that in borderline personality disorder, the various segments and figments of the mind, of the personality, the team agents, call them whatever you want, self-states, you choose, ego states, sub-personalities, you choose a favorite school.

It's clear that in borderline personality disorder, the various components, the various ingredients, the various agents, they don't realize that they belong to the same self. They don't realize that they belong to the same self. They don't realize that they belong to the same narrative.

It seems to be a dysfunction of tagging. The various components are not tagged accurately.

It's like, you know, the internet. When we send a stream of packets, the packets are tagged. Each packet has a tag. And the tag which relates to each packet of information informs the packet of information to which general stream it belongs.

This is the IP architecture of the internet. Packets, packets architecture.

The packets of the borderline personality disorder mind are not tagged, so they don't know to which stream they belong. They cannot create a coherent self at the receiving end.

So borderlines are unable to generate a self-narrative, but this is the outcome, not the cause of the diffuse or disturbed identity.

I'll repeat this. Borderlines, I agree, are unable to generate a self-narrative.

But this is not the cause of a diffused or disturbed identity. It's the outcome of it.

Attempts to solve this conundrum, this chicken and egg, are all over the place.

There was Bollas, the famous psychoanalyst, with his unknown thought, the pre-verbal self, that still stores and keeps the experiences, but cannot verbalize them.

There are others who came up with a tacit self or tacit organizing principle or template.

There is Laszlo Tenery, the Hungarian psychologist who came up with the idea of archaeology of self.

There is Dan Zahavi's minimal self and so on so forth.

But all of them assume that there is a self that is inaccessible, pre-verbal, that is somehow primordial, disorganized, diffuse in effect. And mysteriously, it provides an organizing principle, gives rise to coherence and cohesiveness in a manner and process that is never broached or described accurately.

These are metaphysical speculations. They're not grounded in clinical or laboratory observations. This is not psychology. This is meta-psychology.

And here we are stuck. Because we can explain fully what's happening in the borderline's mind. It's a disruption in identity formation.

But why don't healthy people experience this disruption?

They should have. All of us should have been borderline.

How come only a tiny percentage are borderline?

Genetic predisposition, probably.

But how would this genetic predisposition explain the transition from incoherence to coherence?

Is language the intermediary, the organizing principle?

If so, then language is an external regulator. It regulates us from the outside, which is exactly what Jacques Lacan had suggested, the mirror and the language.

It's an open debate and one of the most fascinating in psychology.

And even I, with my 190 IQ last measured, cannot solve it.

Maybe you will be able to.