Journal of Analytical Psychology 1993, 38, 87-100 BORDERLINE STATES: Disorders of the self ALAN EDWARDS, London Our central theme for the year has been that of borderline states, and the borderline and archetypal levels of the psyche, their occurrence in treatment, and the difficulties emerging in the transference-counter- transference. It would be necessary to write a book to do justice to the papers and discussions and the richness of the clinical material. You will remember we have had papers from Michael Fordham, Lorenzo Bacelle, Geoffrey Brown, Jane Bunster, Patrick Pietroni, Vernon Yorke, Jean Thomson, and Barbara Wharton. Looking at the issues raised, and the references given, it is clear that we have been strongly influenced by the psychoanalysts who have been referred to as the school of British Object Relations Theory. The authors quoted are Klein, Bion, Meltzer, Winnicott, Bowlby, Rosenfeld, and Balint; and the subjects are: the mirror role of the mother, the experience of omnipotence, container and con- tained, the prototype of learning, beta-elements and alpha-function, holding, the environmental mother, maternal preoccupation, maternal reverie, unconscious fantasy, and positions, depressive and paranoid- schizoid. Fordham’s deintegrative-reintegrative model uses Jung’s concepts of the ego, the archetypes, and the self, picturing the unfolding of the self, the development of an inner world, and the ego. He has made a valuable integration in this model with the concepts of the Kleinians, and it seems possible in time that they might discover that the concepts of a primal self, with an organizing and transcendent function, might be a useful addition to their own theoretical ideas. It is of interest that, during this year, the Children’s Section has been studying the Model and its meaning for their work in infant obser- vation and the treatment of children. Papers by James Astor and Elizabeth Urban have enlarged on Michael Fordham’s concepts. Do some of these ideas have a relevance to our clinical topic of the year, and point to where pathological developments may be occurring? Here are some of the central ideas taken from Fordham’s paper on an archetypal developmental model: (2021-8774/93/3801/087/$3.00/1 © 1993 The Society of Analytical Psychology88 A. Edwards 10 The primal self cannot be experienced, but unfolds when brought into relation with a suitable environment. The primary state of the self is a psychosomatic entity, with an inherited potential, bound at first by a cell membrane, and later by a skin. In response to environmental conditions it responds in pre- formed ways. In relation to the environmental mother, it deintegrates and reintegrates, and takes an active part in bonding with her, and in shaping and forming the environment. Birth demands a new adaptation by the self. Deintegration, which has begun in the womb, then happens in a massive way, causing primitive fear such as ‘nameless dread’. Reintegration follows the provision of a suitable environment. The first experiences are of whole objects, as early deintegrates are very close to the self integrate. Deintegration must have taken place and produced some psychic structure before projective identification can take place. The two processes are not the same. Projective identification is a powerful method of forming arche- typal images. Fordham calls the objects behind these archetypal images, self objects. He considers that ‘much of an infant’s experience comes under the heading of being the best possible expression for an other- wise unknown entity, namely the archetype, but the concrete- ness of the experience is very unlike the symbolic experience to which Jung referred’. The primal self is also transcendent, ‘beyond the conflict of opposites such as emotion, love and hate, or creative acts and destructive ones, consciousness and unconsciousness, and so its energies are neutral, as Jung implies in his article “On psychic energy” ’ (Fordham, ‘Notes for the formation of a model of infant development’). In normal development, continuing deintegrations and _reinte- grations lead to object constancy and constancy of the self represen- tations. In our work with borderline patients what is striking is the degree of splitting and failure in integration. Parts of the ego are split off from each other, and from the self. The result is object incon- stancy, diffuse identity, and uncertainties of gender identity. There is a structural vulnerability, with fears and fantasies of disin- tegration, splitting of the body image; the skin may feel unusually thin, or translucent, and in the sense of self there may be a feelingBorderline states 89 of emptiness, of holes, a weakness of apertures, and pockets or cap- sules of hidden intense affects. In the analysis, both the patient and the analyst may be painfully aware of the convulsive attempts of the self to deintegrate and make new reintegrations, which are what lie behind the repeated demands that the analyst gets it right this time. The controlling and omnipotent behaviour reminds us of the existence of the primal self and its close and embracing involvement with the central ego. The deintegrates feel to be making intense efforts to extract responses, which have previously felt to be not there or missing. It is the infant researchers particularly who have described the variety of ways in which the significant other, or in their terminology the self-regarding other, affects the infant’s self experience, and rouses a variety of feelings by gaining attention, rousing curiosity, smiling, holding, exciting, gratifying hunger, and facilitating sleep. David Stern, in his studies of the developing sense of self in the infant, the emergent self, the core self, and the subjective self, has stressed that it is the manner in which the responses are carried out by the self- regulating other which is important to the baby. He says the infant is ‘immersed in the feelings of vitality’ expressed by the parents, in the many non-verbal interactions, qualities of experience to which terms such as ‘surging, fading away, fleeting, or explosive’ might be used, The intensity or urgency of these rushes of feeling quality, pleasurable or undesirable, distinguish them from categorical affects of anger, joy, sadness, etc. ‘Vitality affects occur both in the presence of and in the absence of categorical affects.’ In analysts it often feels that the ‘whole’ child of the borderline patient is demanding ‘whole’ responses, from ‘whole parents’. In relation to this important issue, the demand for the ‘wholeness’ of the analyst, and with that the considerable length of many of these analyses, I am going to quote Jung when he spoke of the patients that ‘hang on’. I am convinced he was speaking of the problems we are concerned with: This ‘hanging on’ as it is called, may be something undesired by both parties, something incomprehensible and even unendurable, without necessarily being negative to life. On the contrary it can easily be a positive hanging on, which although it constitutes an apparently insurmountable obstacle, represents just for that reason a unique situation that demands the maximum effort and therefore enlists the energies of the whole man. In fact, one could say that while the patient is unconsciously and unswervingly seeking the solution to some ultimately insoluble problem, the art and technique of the doctor are doing their best to help him towards it, and