Alice in Wonderland – A Borderline Personality Tale

Introduction

As a child we all read the various children’s stories that had been written up until
that time. Most of these tales presented well to a young audience and allowed a
young mind to identify and enter that world of innocence. We all read and
identified with such tales as children.

For many the one exception to that rule was “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”,
by Lewis Carroll. This strange tale had a strange and disjointed or fragmented
feel to it, and never actually arrived at a satisfying or logical conclusion. When
read with its later counterpart, “Through The Looking Glass”, the story actually
has no proper ending at all.

In reflection this children’s tale stands apart from other stories of its Mid
Victorian era. The book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” seems a more
surreal and fragmented journey that looks it could have been written by Timothy
Leary in the 1960’s whilst on LSD, than from a meek cleric, author and
mathematician from middle class Victorian England.

When one researches the life history of Lewis Carroll, who was the author of
these stories then through the lens of a psychotherapist the penny drops and we
find the deeper meaning and context for these writings. To understand Lewis
Carroll and his children’s books we must understand the Borderline personality
from psychology/psychiatry realms.

The term “Borderline Personality” is a largely misunderstood label that often

gets used to categorise and generalise a person who exhibits a number of
volatile and unstable behaviours. The psychiatric term “Borderline Personality”
was only agreed and defined as late as the 1980’s.

It is variously described by the American Psychiatric Association as “a pervasive

pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and
marked impulsivity”.

In my article The Wizard of Oz – A Myth for our Age I demonstrated how that

tale was a deep psychological myth about the healing journey of men and
women, and how they must deal with their inner woundings and the outer
manifestations of wounding personalities. That tale concentrated its focus on
the depiction of the Narcissistic personality, as depicted in the story as “The
Wizard”.

Children are apt to see their parents and significant others from a magical mind.
In this way their early childhood is a blend of reality and supportive make
believe figures, friends and characters. Some of these are drawn from their fairy
tales, cartoons and stuffed toys. In the face of hostility, chaos, and abuse a child
will often dissociate or leave their body or conscious state, and retreat into their
own fairy tale reality in order to cope and survive.

Fairy tales then have a deep resonance with children as they describe in a child’s
language and imagery the various personalities and people children have to
deal with in the real world. Children need fairy tales to learn about basic
concepts of good and evil, loss and love. Children also resonate to the themes
of such fairy tales and find hope and inspiration, and identification with heroes
from such stories.

Lewis Carroll and his Stories

In terms of the Borderline personality we look beyond The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz for inspiration and guidance. We must go back in time to the Victorian era
where a troubled but logical author wrote a key archetypal fairy tale that
touches on the underlying weirdness, volatility, chaos and strangeness of the
Borderline parent and the challenges facing the innocent child in coming to
terms with this alien mental and emotional landscape. Welcome to Lewis Carroll
and the story we know as “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, and its related
counterpart “Through The Looking Glass”.

 Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was an
author, cleric, mathematician and writer in Victorian England. He is recognised
for ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) and ‘Through the Looking Glass’
(1872), as well as other mathematical and children’s books.

Unlike Frank Baum who wrote “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, Lewis Carroll was
not a spiritual or psychological seeker of truths. He apparently had quite some
trouble in his childhood that included significant neglect. Neglect is one theme
in the childhood of Borderline personalities. His books appear to be a more
unconscious revelation of his own escapism reality and childhood, and hence
the quick descent from the normal childhood of his story character Alice into the
surreal and distorted world of Wonderland in his tales.
Frank Baum was quite conscious to what he wrote in “The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz” as he conveyed the psychological parable of what a person undergoes in
their search for healing, and the traps and dynamics that one may need to face
and surmount. Lewis Carroll was writing children’s stories at face value but in
doing so he revealed much of his own reality and ideas that are convincingly
symbols of his own issues and experiences. Let us explore some of these themes
as they help illustrate the dilemmas of the Borderline personality.

Lewis Carroll had much of the background that can shape this personality. He
was born into the strict moral values of Victorian England. Children were to be
seen and not heard and there was no common understanding of how to raise
children in a nurturing way. The abandonment by the mother of the baby to a
nanny, or of the child to a Boarding school was an all too common idea and
practice back then.

In his own family system this backdrop was made worse by the fact that Lewis
Carroll was the eldest child of five overall, all born in the short space of only 6
years. Such family dynamics would have meant that the baby and then child
would typically have been abandoned to some extent by a mother pre-occupied
with pregnancies, birth and subsequent care of the succession of babies that
followed Lewis Carroll into existence.

There is some evidence that Lewis Carroll had some form of eating disorder
linked to anxiety throughout his life. Eating disorders are considered by some to
be an attempt to take control over the one thing left in life that you can control,
that being your body. This idea stems from the fact that for such a person they
may have felt out of control or possibly raised in conditions where they had no
control over life, or there was chaos about. That type of childhood certainly can
be that for those children raised in a chaotic or a Narcissistic or Borderline
parent family environment.

Carroll was reported by friends to have had an obsessively negative association

with eating and his fear on its impact on his body shape and size (fear of a loss
of control). This is commonly a classic food neurosis that often shows an
attempt to find and maintain control when perhaps there was few other things
in his life that he had control over as a child. In his books Alice changed shape
and size from eating and drinking which is an allegorical reference to his own
fears and distortions around such actions around food and drink.

In the tales, Alice is also having to learn about her body and the way it works
and changes. She talks to her feet and then comes learns some of the new ways
her body is able to perform. She undergoes changes of shape and finds that
nothing in her body is stable or normal. The Borderline personality is known to
fear their own urges, feelings, impulses and desires, as they fear a wider loss of
control as a result.

Also in the book there were other food centric themes that involved punishment
and sudden shape shifting or rule changes. For instance we find The Knave of
Hearts is put on trial for allegedly stealing the Queen’s tarts, with a proposed
penalty of beheading being demanded. The queen represents the Borderline
Mother who in the story was ever demanding, aggressive, and split into the
Black queen and the White queen at times.

The books carry negative themes and associations around food and meal times.
The Tea Party is a Mad Tea Party and the Mad Hatter is a figure at such events.
The Cheshire cat is defined by his mouth which is the last point of the cat to be
present when appearing or disappearing. The oral fixation is seen in a number of
the fictional stories and continues this obsessional theme.

The concept of splitting is a deep psychological truth for both the Borderline
and the Narcissistic personality. As a child’s sense of self emerges it comes into
contact with feelings of hatred. A child raised by a Borderline or Narcissistic
parent is likely to have to face this reality on a regular basis. A child at the age
of two years is considered to naturally enter a developmental phase known as
the narcissistic childhood phase of development.

In its two year old narcissistic phase of development the child is constrained to
only think in absolutes. It will not yet have developed the complex psychological
mechanisms that permit the acceptance of love and hate existing together
towards the same object in the same moment. (Klein:1971).

Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1971) coined the term “splitting” to describe to

describe this reality where the world around us is seen in either-or terms of the
“all good” or “all bad”. The child develops this splitting in its infancy but it still
operates in the narcissistic phase of the child’s reality.

The concept of “splitting” is where the child cannot see the mother both in
terms of the “good mother” and the “bad mother” and so creates a magical
reality of two separate mothers who each show up from time to time. This
preserves the imperative of the “good mother” always being good and not
being compromised by hurtful acts against the child. Instead the “bad mother”
who is someone else is responsible for the hurtful acts against the child
(Klein:1971).
In this way the child can vent its rage against the “bad mother” without
threatening its own survival by killing off the “good mother” who supplies all its
nurturance and survival needs (Klein:1971). A child will have developed a split
sense of  “good mother” and “bad mother”  to cope with the reality of a raging
narcissistic or Borderline personality mother.

Carl Jung noted that almost all fairy tales employed the “splitting effect” of the
“good fairy godmother” archetype  versus the “bad witch” or “cruel mother or
step mother” archetype (Jung:1990). He and psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim
(1932) both agree that this is because it is a concept the young child already has
a reality for and can relate to when reading such stories.

Lewis Carroll may have employed this splitting effect with the various Queens,
and with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum as a reality that reflects how he
employed splitting to cope with his childhood traumas.

The child must go through a form of object constancy where the child can hate
its mother, and annihilate the mother, yet sees the mother is still existing and
still there for the child afterwards (Johnson:1994).  The child has the splitting
defence to assist in this process. Unfortunately some parents respond to the
child’s infantile rages of hatred, anger and  defiance with punishment and their
own adult versions of hate wrapped up as love.

When this occurs the adult in a sense is reacting from their own infantile
thinking. An adult needs to be able to relate to the child in terms of  the child
being both good and bad at the same time for the parent to be able to contain
a child’s emotional reactivity (Goldberg:1993).

When the adult is unable to move beyond seeing the child from a good-and-
bad splitting mechanism then the child will be rejected and subject to adult
parental hatred that the “bad child” now forms in the adult parents mind
(Goldberg:1993). This is what goes on for the adult Borderline personality as
they tend to see others and the world in very black and white terms through
rigidly splitting people into such extremes.

We see in adult Borderline personalities that they may fall in love and see the
“other” initially in terms of being all good, a saviour, perfect and a safe person.
However their highly charged emotional self is also prone to project negative or
paranoid “bad” qualities onto that same person and in doing so they become for
the Borderline personality a sudden shape shifter, who has betrayed them,
become an unsafe object, and become the object of their now cold, rageful,
traumatized self as they act out of survival reactions.
What is actually happening is that the person represents a recreation of the
mother for the Borderline personality. In truth the mother may have gone from
being loving to hurtful, from caring to cold, from accepting to abandoning, from
stable to unstable, in seconds, and so the child got traumatized, and developed
a splitting effect to cope with this unstable behavior.

As a later adult the now traumatized person is alert and hyper-aroused to

anyone they “love” suddenly turning on them and changing into a demon.
Partners of Borderline personalities report these extreme reactions occurring in
their relationship, and which are triggered by small or innocent gestures,
dynamics, words, associations or even smells or scents which trigger the
Borderline into their “acting out” of rage and psychotic symptoms or episodes.

When this happens to a child who can have no concept of what the adult parent
is exhibiting, they are themselves wounded in a way that sets them up to
become the next generation of traumatized and possibly Borderline personality.
The child is engulfed and unwittingly drawn down the rabbit hole of the parent’s
madness into their adult world of distortion, madness, terror and rage. This is
what happened to Alice in the fairy tale.

A child who is shamed or punished when it expresses its own infantile rage and
hatred soon learns to suppress the expression of such feelings (Goldberg:1993).
The Borderline and the Narcissistic parent tends to split the child into the
idealized “good child” and force the child to disown its shadow feelings and
behaviours as the “bad child” into their unconsciousness (Klein:1971).

We see Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum as two “split” personas in the fairy tale
who had disowned all shadow or negative emotions. They were oppositional to
each other and they also had dysmorphic body shapes which again relates to
Carroll’s fear of loss of bodily control.

The critical parent or the demanding parent who wants perfection and absolute
obedience of the child “out of love” will tend to use damaging parental
messages to the child. Such parents will be seen reminding the child what is
wrong with it, how it “got it wrong”, how the child is stupid and needs to try
harder, and how the child must be punished for its failures. Here is the hatred
that comes from love and here is the shadow side of love which if not dealt with
in the parent will wound the child and create the basis for its self-hatred.

It is from such a dynamic that the child creates a false self of the “good child” to
survive. Anytime the child is made wrong, made unsafe, and made unlovable it
seeks to adjust and adapt to its environment. It does so by rejecting and
disowning into the unconscious all the hated parts of itself as told to it by its
parents and caretakers, and noting what areas remain in itself as “lovable” and
so build a false self around these parts where they exist, and become “lovable”
for just parts of who their authentic self is.

The problem for the child of the Borderline parent is that the wounding by them
starts too early and continues for too long for the child to form stable defences
and a stable social mask to present to the world.

The adult Borderline personality is known for unconsciously creating splitting in

various mundane and major aspects of their life. Lewis Carroll was known by his
friends to have a “dual personality”. In this way he was described as someone
who had on one hand a calm, quiet detached, logical mind and self, but yet
upon him could descend “dark moods”. This Victorian era term is now thought
to describe either a depressive effect or a raging effect, or both. It also shows
another form of splitting in the psyche of the person.

Note as well that even his name was split. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson became
Lewis Carroll which is a form of splitting. This dual personality effect is a
common trait of the Borderline personality. They may have a basic persona from
which they seem to organise their core experiences, but this may quickly
fragment and then another persona emerges which has a totally different look
and feel to the observer. A common type of second persona is the “raging
witch” which is demonic and destructive and may physically be unsafe to be
around as it can engage in physical harm of others.

It may also be a childlike, waifish, dependent or needy persona which is

collapsed and “young” in presentation. Both these “emotional parts of the
personality” only tend to show up under duress and in the face of the person
somehow becoming triggered or reactive to life and events in the moment. Later
on I present a trauma model to explain this aspect of the Borderline personality.

The Borderline personality is also one which tries to exert control and to find
safety in black and white concepts, systems, objects and dynamics. As such they
are seeking stability and continuity in their world which may have been quite
fluid, chaotic and subject to sudden rule or reality change.

Lewis Carroll developed an early obsession with mathematics which is a black

and white construct that is stable, consistent and can be a form of escapism. As
such it may have been an escapism from a troubled childhood reality where he
retreated into books and his thinking mind. His authored books were full of
elements of mathematics and logic, such as cards, chess, and the use of twisted
logic or reality to arrive at sane or logical outcomes.

Another rigid concept around which the reality challenged child could anchor
themself is time. Time at least was a constant in an insecure world where many
stable things were rendered insecure, false or changed due to the psychotic
reality, or distortions of the Borderline parent.

Children of Borderline parents have been found to sometimes possess a form of

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Such obsessive behaviours are often anchored
to objects or frameworks which provide the constancy or reliability unavailable
in childhood, or which provide the safety that was not theirs in childhood. Lewis
Carroll had behaviours we would now consider as OCD.

OCD also serves to distract a person from their underlying anxiety and Lewis was
known to become anxious each evening whereupon he had distractions and
rituals to occupy his time and mind. These included writing his books and
solving riddles and puzzles. A child of a Borderline personality parent often
spent their childhood trying to solve riddles and puzzling logic or making sense
of their disturbed parent’s behaviour.

Time would be a classic example of a rigid and reliable framework to obsess

about. The checking of door locks might be an example of a ritual to make one
safe. In Lewis Carroll’s novels we note for instance that the White Rabbit is
obsessive about time.

In what may be a reflection of Lewis Carroll himself, we observe the fearful and
paranoid reaction of the White Rabbit to his own lateness. The Hatter’s watch
shows days because “it’s always six o’ clock and tea-time”. This means that the
only important time to note was tea time at six o’clock.

This scene spawns the famous line now oft repeated “I’m late, I’m late, for a very
important date”.  Time could also be a trigger for some Borderline personalities
who found reason to be fearful of many objects or events in their households as
they took on some special meaning for them. Some parents may become worse
at a certain time, like after drinking alcohol later in the day or evening.

The reason why time might become an anchor is that all the other constants
such as rules and realities are fluid and not stable or constant. A child growing
up with an unstable, narcissistic or Borderline parent(s) may find rules are ever
changing, only apply some times, to only a few, and in contradiction of other
rules. This traumatises and undermines a child searching for meaning, purpose
and stability.

In the stories Alice is often traumatised and is seen to cry a lot when it’s
impossible to obey the rules of the Wonderland, which are obtuse, surreal, and
confusing.  “Everything is so out-of-the-way down here”, is the statement that
Alice makes about this craziness.

Alice feels she must be mad or else why would she be in Wonderland as seen by
the comment of the Cheshire Cat that “everyone in Wonderland is mad,
otherwise they wouldn’t be down here”. Many children of Borderline parents,
and the Borderline personality themself both feel and fear they are mad or crazy
as they try to cope with reality and life.

In the Victorian era it was such that time dominated themes such as meal times,
which we have seen was already the subject of anxiety or negative experiences
for Lewis Carroll. It is quite feasible that the association that existed between
time and meals which equates to food could then become a fixation for the
young Carroll. This is shown in how time is treated as an anxious and fearful
concept in his stories, and with his own confirmed phobias with food and meals.

The Borderline personality has only a tenuous grip on a stable reality and is
known to suffer delusions and cognitive distortions when processing reality.
They appear to genuinely believe their own distortions and as such are “telling
the truth” to themselves at least. This is in contrast to the Narcissist who tends
to know a truth but ignores it, lies, exaggerates, or denies it, but without
necessarily believing their own distortion.

A child or partner of the Borderline personality must face the crazy reality of that
person and often starts to doubt their own reality in the process. A baby or
young child has no effective discrimination to reject the often inconsistent
reality presented to them, which creates object or reality inconstancy, and
undermines their own stable reality. One gets sucked down the rabbit hole and
then must make the insane become sane or make the surreal somehow
understandable, as was the challenge for Alice, and possibly Lewis Carroll.

Lewis Carroll was also reported to have had an obsessive interest in

photographing little girls, often dressed and with a countenance that shows they
directly shaped his description of Alice in his books. A photo is both a stable
image but also an idealisation through staged posture, dress and grooming of
the subject, such were the studio portraits of the Victorian era.
In a way this too shows both possible escapism into the technology and stable
reality of a photograph that cannot shape shift and change on oneself once
taken. Early cameras and the process of photography was quite involved,
mathematical, black and white, and captured a “stable image”. A stable image of
reality is what eludes many Borderline personalities and possibly Lewis Carroll in
his childhood.

The escapism is also found in the time, attention and effort employed in writing
his various types of literature, including in his most well-known novel, “Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland”.  His fictional literature carried that paradox of being
both logical and crazy at the same time, which is in itself both a set of extremes
or “splits”, as well as conveying unconscious truths of the writer himself, who
attempted to make logic from the illogical.

Another example of how the child searches for a stable reality from the
inconsistent and distorted reality of the Borderline parent, is seen in his fictional
books where Carroll’s characters consistently ignored the commonly understood
reality in order to reach a more logical conclusion. This logical craziness is the
often reported experience of adult children of Borderline parents.

In the story he was also want to employing mirrors which reflect a truth back to
the observer, and indeed it is “mirroring” that a baby uses to create their reality
via interaction with its mother. Alice encountered numerous mirror reversals in
Wonderland which is symbolic of how the mirroring process was subject to
changes or inconsistencies, which is a possible fate that can befall a baby raised
by a Borderline personality mother.

The logical craziness extended to the splitting concept within Alice herself.   We
see in the story how at one point Alice pretends to be two people, speaking in
two different voices, but yet making logical sense. This is crazy logic.

At a key point in the story Alice is put on trial by the queen, which symbolises
how the child is judged and persecuted, criticised and punished constantly by
the borderline mother. In this crazy scene Alice splits into key personas and
assumes the positions of juror, jury, and witness at the trail. She is the accused
and the accuser, the innocent and the guilty, yet this is rationalised by the crazy
logic in the story, just as the Borderline tries to create logic out of their own
internal inconsistencies, distortions, and fragmented parts of self.

In another key scene we see Alice become again the accused and the accuser,
but then the abuser and the abused. This scene occurs during a croquet game,
which in real life was a passion of Lewis Carroll. This confrontational scene
symbolises the dynamic of the mother and child in argument which the child
cannot win.

Here in the story, Alice accuses the Queen of cheating. A rage of opposition
occurs and then Alice attacks herself by cheating herself and then has to punish
herself and so boxes her own ears for cheating. This symbolises the mother who
makes the protesting child feel bad and so the child takes on the mother’s
reality and feels bad and so must hate and punish themself for perceived
wrongs projected onto them by the mother.

What is interesting is that the female figures such as the Queen and the Duchess
in the story are aggressive, dominant characters who suppress their husbands or
kings who are portrayed as weak and rulers by name only. This is a clue to many
Borderline household dynamics where the mother chooses a passive and
therefore “safe” husband who then later will be dominated and suppressed by
the emotionally volatile wife.

When the Borderline wife attacks and rages at her children, such a husband may
not protect the child as they too are in fear of their mate. The child notes the
weakness in the father and this reinforces to them the dominance and power of
the mother.

Another clue with Lewis Carroll was his sleep disorder which affected him from
childhood. He would fear sleep as nightmares haunted him which may be
possibly his unconscious playing out nightmarish scenes and traumas
unresolved from his childhood. He apparently read books late into the night or
worked on mathematical problems to ward off sleep. Borderline personalities
are often plagued with sleep problems and nightmares in adulthood.

In his story of Alice we see themes of sleep associated with the surreal reality of
Wonderland. Alice is actually dreaming in both fictional books that have her as
the central character. Alice encountered sleep dynamics in Wonderland such as
at The Tea Party, and in other situations. Sleep can be a form of dissociative
defence in children and adults to avoid reality.

This can be a symbol that the child who grows up with a hostile or traumatic
childhood often is found in therapy to have no childhood memories, or to
struggle to know if those key events were experienced or dreamt. Sleep is also a
form of escape or dissociation from reality when perhaps that reality is hard to
face.
In the end of “Alice In Wonderland” and in the darker and stranger sequel
“Through The Looking Glass” we find the more adult Alice and Alice’s sister
noting “”we are but older children, dear, who fret to find our bedtime near.”,
alluding to the idea that the childhood issues remain unresolved and that the
fears have not gone away with adulthood.

A certain rationalisation is recorded at the end of the tale in that “and how she
would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and
eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of
long-ago”. Alice learns at the end of the story that her whole reality in
Wonderland really is ‘nothing but a pack of cards’.

This points to an unstable reality she has had to make do with and master, but
which could at any time collapse like a “house of cards”. All through the story
Alice She is constantly challenged to identify herself by the creatures she meets
and struggles to do so convincingly as she is both mistaken by other animals,
plus she has doubts about her identity as well.

At this point, Alice has emerged still with a shaky identity and identity that is the
common adult outcome for children of Borderline or Narcissistic parents. She
must live with her childhood legacy and wakes up into the ‘real’ world, the world
of adults.

In “Through The Looking Glass” we find a degree of confidence and self mastery
in Alice as she enters Wonderland and is now stronger in her identity. It is a
cautionary tale however as Alice is determined to become a queen (become her
mother).

In this respect we must reflect that quite a number of children raised by

Borderline mothers will go on to become a Borderline personality adult
themselves. Lewis Carroll almost seems to recognise this by having Alice identify
with and aspire to be a queen herself.  However the instability of her identity
again shows up in the scene where she enters the woods (fear) which causes her
to freeze and forget her own name.

The unresolved dilemma of the adult Borderline personality not having a stable
sense of self, or truly knowing who they are, is underlined by the end of the
story in “Through The Looking Glass”.

Here we find the split personality as expressed through Tweedle Dee and
Tweedle Dum who show Alice the sleeping Red King and tell her that she is not
a real person; she only exists in his dream. This craziness and challenge to her
reality remains unresolved at the end of the book just as in life the Borderline
remains unresolved within themselves as to their true reality.

In summary, it can be seen that the Borderline person cannot easily be tied
down into a easily definable character or stable personality. It is in the nature of
the Borderline personality to be volatile and changeable much like Wonderland,
yet trying to remain stable and consistent within all of this.

The classic children’s story, “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll is perhaps an

apt description of the reality and dynamics of the Borderline personality. The
Borderline personality was well illustrated by Lewis Carroll who may have had
Borderline personality traits himself in real life.

The Walt Disney version of the tale was a sanitised version of the darker themes
in the book. Tim Burton captured this dark sense of the tale in his disturbing
adult oriented portrayal of the book that was released only in 2010. One senses
from Burton’s faithful interpretation that this is not really a children’s tale at all
but one of finding sanity within insanity.

The Borderline personality is one who can go through life largely misdiagnosed
or undiagnosed, and who can be on appearance sane, rational and rigid, often
achieving success in their field. However on closer inspection one finds under
this often cold but logical personality a hidden world of instability and
emotional eruptions that may erupt and drag them down into their own rabbit
hole into a surreal world of trauma