Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Michael H. Stone
trum disorders and the level of adverse environment (Stone, 2013). Dif-
ferent scenarios were discussed. If, for example, one had a high genetic
risk for bipolar disorder but had grown up in a tranquil, non-abusive
environment, the eventual illness might consist of bipolar disorder
combined with BPD (more likely in female patients). In a similarly tran-
quil home, someone with just moderate genetic risk for bipolar disor-
der might emerge with a bipolar spectrum condition—but without the
BPD. Moderate genetic risk but coupled with an adverse environment
(that might also include incest) would then predispose to the combined
condition: bipolar disorder plus BPD. Absent any significant genetic
risk, however, a highly adverse environment would predispose just to
BPD alone. The section that follows provides examples of BPD patients
from families with varying degrees of genetic risk.
mother’s second husband whom she married when the patient was 10.
The patient idolized her father, who had been a kindly and indulgent
man; his death was the major trauma in her life. Her mother was inor-
dinately strict and at times punitive. During her childhood years, if her
mother felt she had been “naughty,” she would be strapped to a chair
and spanked severely. Her worst punishment came when her mother
caught her and a boy (they were both seven) showing each other their
sexual parts. This set the stage for one of the major symptoms that
emerged during her adolescence, namely, pronounced germ-phobia
and related obsessive-compulsive phenomena. She suffered a break-
down during college, made a suicide attempt with pills, and was hospi-
talized for a lengthy period. Her psychiatrist used a primarily psycho-
analytic approach, focusing on the connection between her equating
sex with sinfulness. Her symptoms persisted after her release to a point
where she could no longer handle money, because it had been touched
by so many people. Clothes and bedding were sent daily to the clean-
ers. Cognitive aberrations developed along similar lines, and this led
from her original diagnoses of BPD and bipolar disorder to BPD and
schizoaffective disorder. Walking in the street past a fat or pregnant
woman made her feel she would somehow become pregnant and fat.
In reaction, she became anorectic and quite slender. She was 30 when I
began treating her. My initial approach was also psychoanalytically ori-
ented. She was very receptive, worked diligently with dream material,
and showed good understanding of the connection between her child-
hood sexual “sinfulness” and her morbid fear of all things “dirty” and
sexual. But the symptoms did not lose their strength. I began to adopt
a more behavior-oriented (and to me, less familiar) approach. I asked
her once, for example, to hold out her hands. I dropped several dollar
bills onto them, and urged her to accept that “you will live to the mor-
row.” Meaning: nothing bad will happen to you. She gradually became
more at ease with handling money and with sleeping several nights in a
row without changing the sheets. She began to date a man she had met
at a social gathering. She gradually overcame her compunctions about
sex. He proposed to her and intimated that he was a man of means.
But this turned out to be untrue: he proved to be more in love with her
family’s money than with her. She broke the engagement, but became
suicidal; her fragility was heightened by her having stopped her anti-
psychotic medication for several weeks while she was away with him.
Upon her return, I restored her medication and went with her to the
emergency room, where after a few hours her suicidal feelings abated.
This was a turning point. During the next several months, she became
less depressed and less symptomatic. She met a much more suitable
(and honorable) man—whom she later married. I have maintained con-
CLINCIAL TREATMENT GUIDES FOR BPD 13
tact with her over the ensuing 30 years, during which time she raised
a son who is now in college and, after completing training, has been
working effectively in a mental-health profession. She would no longer
be considered either borderline or schizoaffective. Contributing to her
emergence from the severe symptomatology of her earlier years were
the important (and mitigating) factors of her positive personality traits,
such as those emphasized in the five-factor model of Costa and Widi-
ger (2002) and enumerated by Trull and McCrae (2002)—in particular:
agreeableness and conscientiousness (Stone, 1993, pp. 112-130).
in the victim as she (or rarely he) enters adolescence. I had occasion,
when making diagnostic evaluations at a drug-abuse clinic, to inter-
view a woman in her 30s with BPD and multiple drug abuse (alcohol,
marijuana, and cocaine). Her history of incest was the most sordid I had
encountered before or since. When she was seven, her father would
immobilize her with handcuffs and then proceed to rape her as well as
beat her with a stick. Her wounds came to the attention of the school
authorities, and the father was arrested. Instead of receiving the life
sentence he deserved, his mother bailed him out of jail where he had
been held for several weeks. By the time I saw my patient years lat-
er, her life consisted of a series of brief and stormy relationships with
men, drug abuse, suicide gestures, and all-too-understandable anger
and misanthropy. There was no indication that there had been bipolar
relatives in her background—not even her father, who was a sadistic
psychopath, but not a manic-depressive.
INADEQUATE MOTHERING
DISCUSSION
and live essentially well, achieving remission and even recovery (Stone,
1990; Zanarini et al., 2012).
As for the impact of incest and other forms of abusive or otherwise
disadvantageous parenting (such as neglect or punitiveness), there is
a variety of pathological consequences. Becoming borderline is one of
them—one manifestation of which is a heightened “free-floating anxi-
ety” (Dulz & Schreyer, 1997). Incest may also lead to the development
of insecure attachment, as well as to the characteristics of post-traumat-
ic stress disorder (PTSD)—with its startle responses, nightmares, intru-
sive recollections of original traumatic events, and so forth (Alexander
et al., 1998). In another study, the timing at which incest experiences
occurred played a role in the later severity of symptomatology. McLean
and Gallop (2003), for example, found that the development of BPD
and complex PTSD was more common in women who had experienced
early-onset versus late-onset (viz. post-pubertal) paternal incest.
Erdinç and colleagues (2004) point to the multiple effects associated
with incest: besides BPD and PTSD, one also encounters dissociative
amnesia—the latter characterized by an obliteration from memory of
the traumatic sexual experiences (until eventually restored through
psychotherapy). Another unfortunate consequence of the incest experi-
ence, observed in a number of gynecologic patients, was chronic pelvic
pain, in addition to BPD. Early family dysfunction, including incest,
was noted in a significant proportion of these women (Gross, Doerr,
Caldirola, Guzinski, & Ripley, 1980/1981).
One of the defining attributes of BPD is “inappropriate, intense an-
ger or difficulty controlling anger” (American Psychiatric Association,
2013). Kernberg (1994) has examined the issue from the perspective of
the relationship between inborn (i.e., genetic) predisposition to aggres-
sive behavior versus the (post-natal) effects of severe trauma and psy-
chosocial pathology stemming from adverse early experiences. From
a therapeutic standpoint, he drew attention to management of intense
hatred, linked to aggression, in the transference, when a psychoana-
lytically oriented form of therapy is the primary treatment modality.
It is clear from both the clinical vignettes and the references on incest
cited here that inordinate anger may arise from both pre- and post-
natal influences. Many persons born with a genetic predisposition to
bipolar disorder may show the predominantly manic symptomatology,
a common manifestation of which, along with manic grandiosity, is the
temperamental factor of (extreme) irritability. The latter may surface as
a personality marked by a heightened predisposition to anger. And as
we have noted, a good number of patients with BPD have developed as
borderline via this form of inheritance, even if raised in a non-abusive
(and incest-free) environment. But as also noted, many patients with
20 STONE
BPD, even with no known risk for bipolar disorder, come by their inor-
dinate anger in reaction to incest or to other adverse factors, such as pa-
rental brutality or devastating criticism and humiliation. We have also
drawn attention to the many combined cases of BPD, where the patient
has been burdened by both genetic and environmental disadvantages.
Though most of the related literature stems from studies in the United
States and Europe, a similar situation is described in an article from the
Indian subcontinent (Menon, Chaudhari, Saldanha, Devabhaktuni, &
Bhattacharya, 2016). In their study of 36 BPD patients, almost half (16
or 44%) reported a history of childhood sexual abuse, usually occurring
between the ages of seven and twelve. The abnormalities ascribed to
the abuse were chiefly identity disturbance, recurrent suicidal or self-
harm behaviors, and paranoid/dissociative symptoms. It is worth re-
calling that the intense jealousy noted in certain sexually abused BPD
patients, especially incest victims, is itself a paranoid reaction in which
all subsequent sexual partners are suspect—of infidelity. In the typical
case of father-daughter incest, the daughter comes to realize that her
father was obviously unfaithful to her mother—so, in effect, how can
any man be trusted?
Though incest in BPD patients has gotten considerable attention,
others have drawn attention to the high frequency of adverse parental
factors. Judith Herman and colleagues (1989) mentioned, for example,
how in their studies four out of five (81%) patients with BPD had suf-
fered some form of abuse, including physical abuse (71%), sexual abuse
(68%), and witnessing serious domestic violence (62%). One colleague
in the Herman, Perry, and van der Kolk article explains further that
prolonged and severe trauma early in life often leads to the emotional
dysregulation that is a key feature of BPD—predisposing to self-sooth-
ing behaviors: clinginess and overdependency in relationships, eating
disorders, substance abuse, or the paradoxical self-mutilation—para-
doxical because self-cutting, for example, would be painful for an or-
dinary person, but is acceptable to some borderline patients, since the
controlled and bearable physical pain becomes an antidote to the un-
bearable and global psychological pain (van der Kolk, Hostetler, Herron,
& Fisler, 1994). Some consider traumatic childhood to be the main etio-
logical factor in the development of BPD (Kuritárné, 2005), although
I believe this impression is to an extent sample-dependent. Cultural
and socioeconomic factors enter into the equation, since (as shown by
Russell, 1986) incest and family brutality are more common in certain
cultural backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions and less so in oth-
ers, such that the balance between genetic and environmental factors
is not the same in all samples of BPD patients. More detailed impres-
sions and connections arose out of the large-scale study of 290 BPD
CLINCIAL TREATMENT GUIDES FOR BPD 21
patients by Zanarini and her colleagues (2002). Sexual abuse, for ex-
ample, tended to occur both in childhood and adolescence on a weekly
basis, usually for a year or more. Sexual penetration and/or use of force
were widespread, occurring in over half the cases. Severity of the abuse
was noted to correlate with symptom severity in all the major aspects
of borderline psychopathology; namely, affect, cognition, impulsivity,
and disturbed interpersonal relationships. Others have been at pains to
remind us that several personality disorders besides BPD are also often
set in motion by sexual and physical abuse, especially paranoid and
antisocial disorders. The marked jealousy in certain women who had
been incest victims is itself a variety of paranoid disorder. Sexual, phys-
ical, and emotional abuse was common in the backgrounds of paranoid
patients of whatever sort (Bierer et al., 2003).
Indeed, cases of pure BPD—with no accompanying personality
disorders—are all but unknown. Almost invariably, BPD will be ac-
companied by one or more comorbid personality disorders, especially
among the so-called dramatic cluster in DSM: histrionic, narcissistic,
and antisocial. But other disorders are also common: paranoid and de-
pendent (Oldham, Skodol, Hyler, Rosnick, & Davies, 1992). In this re-
gard, the only patient I treated in the past 50 years who was the victim
of father-son incest (he had been anally raped repeatedly during his
adolescence) met criteria for BPD (he showed five items: identity dis-
turbance, suicidal behaviors, affective instability, inappropriate anger,
and stress-related paranoid ideation), but also, and more prominently,
for paranoid personality disorder. Adding to his distrust and paranoid
development was his older brother who, out of wanton cruelty, used to
push his hands onto a hot radiator. Though he was a linguistics scholar,
his self-regard was severely impaired, and he felt that I looked down
on him as though I would “rather treat a Rockefeller for nothing” than
treat him for a modest fee. In the beginning, he made violent threats
toward me, but softened when he realized that we had some things in
common; we both spoke German and Japanese and were both aficio-
nados of opera. But he never overcame his distrust of his co-workers
and often felt the police were checking up on him. My work with him
was primarily supportive, in hopes of enhancing his self-esteem. On
one occasion when he was about to throw away his opera ticket be-
cause he didn’t deserve it, I wrote on a prescription pad: “Go to the
damn opera!” And he did. This was in line with the recommendations
of Gunderson and Chu (1993) who advised, when dealing with bor-
derline patients who had been traumatized via early child abuse, that
clinicians endeavor to facilitate a stronger therapeutic alliance through
acknowledgement of the patient’s victimization: this, by enhancing the
patient’s often enfeebled sense of self-worth. The authors also under-
22 STONE
lined the value of reframing the patient’s experience in the here and
now as a consequence of the childhood trauma. In the case of my sexu-
ally and physically brutalized patient, my task was to help him un-
derstand—through sympathy and decency, more than through correct
interpretations—that the human race was not as universally malign as
his past had taught him to expect. In line with the growing emphasis
on early childhood trauma as the primary factor setting in motion the
development of BPD, Saunders and Arnold, writing in the same year
as the Gunderson and Chu article (1993), criticized the inconsistent
findings of the earlier etiological speculations that emphasized sepa-
ration-individuation issues, empathic failures in early childhood, early
losses and separations, and so forth. Instead they remarked how a half
to three-quarters of BPD patients had childhood abuse and trauma in
their histories—which Saunders and Arnold saw as of greater etiologi-
cal importance. These impressions are more in harmony with my own
views, where many of the personality traits seen again and again in
BPD patients can be ascribed in fair measure to incest victimization—
particularly, mistrustfulness, jealousy, seductiveness, hostility, impul-
sivity, defiance, and emotional volatility (Stone, 1989). The critique of
Saunders and Arnold (1993) notwithstanding, we should not overlook
the impact in certain borderline patients of problems relating to ad-
verse mother-child, rather than father-child, interactions.
In a study from Heidelberg and Palermo of 44 adolescent female
hospitalized borderline patients and 47 controls, the three main inde-
pendent predictors of the BPD–related psychopathology were (in that
order) sexual abuse, generally dysfunctional family, and low maternal
care (Infurna et al., 2016). Under the heading of “low maternal care,”
there were several varieties. Some mothers, for example, offered what
was called “affectionless control”—characterized by low care and high
overprotection. This was often associated with subsequent depressive
syndromes. Some mothers, in contrast, showed “neglectful parenting,”
where there was low care and little protection. The authors speculated
that inadequate mothering might magnify the ill effects of other forms
of parental maltreatment (including sexual or physical abuse).
In my own studies, 28% of the female BPD patients had had to deal
with maternal inadequacies. In the largest group (12 patients), the
problem was chiefly maternal hostility. Three of the patients had also
been incest victims. There had been one suicide. The hostility often took
the form of withering criticism and contempt; one of the mothers had
also been physically abusive. Six of the mothers had been neglectful;
sometimes this took the form of grossly preferring the patient’s brother.
Three of the mothers had been warm and consistently caring—but had
been rendered largely unavailable emotionally because their husbands
CLINCIAL TREATMENT GUIDES FOR BPD 23
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CLINCIAL TREATMENT GUIDES FOR BPD 25