THE BORDERLINE PERSONALITY

"I swear, if you existed, I’d divorce you."
-Martha/Edward Albee, Ernest Lehman

The Borderline Personality - A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulse behavior. Beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts.

Three Films That Got It Right...
WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? - George and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) are denizens of a small college campus and locked in a marriage that is less a marriage than it is an ongoing bloodsport. They spar, they wound - eventually, they annihilate. Their weapons of choice in their ongoing feud are their merciless tongues and their eloquence with insults; both fueled by their seething, decades old pain. There can only be destruction in the spectrum of Martha's emotions, which isn't a spectrum at all as much as it is merely two points between which she flies with startling and unpredictable speed.

When two unnamed guests arrive, they act as catalysts, transforming George and Martha's taste for blood to an all-out hunger. Actually, the two guests do have names - Nick and Honey - but that is all but lost on George and Martha. They don't need names as all the people in George and Martha's sphere only serve as pawns in their all-consuming black hole of a union from which no light can escape. The man is simply the newest biology professor and his mate is, "a wifey little mouse." They serve as unwitting victims caught in the path of destruction as they are initiated into the academia of New Carthage College - which after this particular evening, should be re-christened to New Carnage College.

MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE - Dorothy Parker (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the Mrs. Parker in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, is known as a writer, a wit, and a charter member of the Edwardian New York City Theater world glitterati. She is a woman of fierce intelligence - and equally fierce self-destruction - with undeniable talent, even genius, for not only the bon mot and her acerbic humor, but also for choosing the wrong men. She stumbles through a society of literature and drama - drinking her way through good times and bad, alienating friends and foes alike, and falling in love with married or abusive men. Occasionally she will even write.

She moves from hovel to hotel, yearning for recognition and love, yet scorning it if any is offered. She is as brutal in her criticism of herself as she is with the hands that feed her (her various employers and the other members of New York's literary elite). She is fired from jobs due to her obduracy and she is left broken and alone by a string of men whom she can only insult.

FATAL ATTRACTION - In New York, Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) meets Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) in Fatal Attraction. What starts off as a simple, recreational extra-marital romp, soon becomes something much more disturbing and unpredictable - and dangerous. Alex goes from amorous to suicidal in a heartbeat; from rational to raving with the slightest perceived slight. Dan tries to circumvent the damage to both Alex and his family, but his attempts at rationality fall on irrational ears. Things become very tense as Alex insinuates her life into Dan's family just as her behavior becomes increasingly more violent.
The Rocky Road
The Borderline Personality is one that is defined by consistent patterns of instability in relationships with others as well is in self-image. Borderlines have little if any impulse control and suffer a pervasive sense of loneliness and depression. They can exhibit emotions that appear excessive-larger than life-and these emotions can be highlighted by rapid mood swings. They worry about being engulfed and loosing identity while at the same time maintaining fears of abandonment. They often place demands on relationships with an air of entitlement that overwhelms and alienates their partners or friends. There is an inability to plan and a marked incapacity to defend against primitive impulses. They are unable to stop these impulses (usually the negative kind), unable to let their conscious be their guide to their behavior. They experience alternating and contradicting views of themselves. This tendency leads them to apply the same polar-extreme outlook to others (good people vs. bad people; Heaven vs. Hell). Characteristics include loneliness, emptiness, suicidal gestures, conscious rage, demanding natures, hostile and dependent relationships mixed with a great concern for interpersonal loss.

The Borderline Personality is a bastard breed, a dumpsite for categorizing those individuals that “sort of are” and “sort of aren’t.” The term, Borderline, first came to prominence in the 1950s and early 1960s as a way to describe patients who were exhibiting signs that classified them most commonly as neurotic. The difference with these individuals was that time and again their behavior was “on the border” of psychosis. These Borderline individuals have a variety of symptoms such as anxiety, obsessive/compulsive behavior, multiple phobias, sexually compulsive behavior, and substance abuse. As an interesting side note, three quarters of those diagnosed are women.

Although not constantly lost in a world of psychosis, these Borderline individuals do have episodes-called micropsychotic episodes. These individuals are termed Borderline Delusional. Over the years, Martha (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) has progressively moved closer and closer to a complete break. "You've moved bag and baggage into your fantasy world," George tells Martha. Her micropsychotic episodes have, you could say, become less small. Martha responds: "You make excuses-maybe tomorrow he'll be dead, maybe you'll be dead-then something happens one night and it goes snap.” Mrs. Parker is also shown to be getting progressively less healthy. After having been tossed aside yet again-or having pushed her man away-she falls into bed with nothing but a bottle. Her dog is starving, as is she. Dorothy tells the animal, "We don't want to have a breakdown-messes kill us." Straddling the borderline, Dorothy is neurotic enough to sense the impending psychosis. It is also becoming clearer to those around her that her grip on her life is slackening. Her friend Robert Benchley objectively observes later: "You were a mess, bloody and drooling. You were pathetic and disgusting."

Borderline characters have the uncanny ability to create and sustain an environment of unhappiness in their day to day lives. Yet with the Borderline, it is something more than a garden-variety ennui they have grown accustomed to living with. Borderline Personalities have the rare capability of being miserable on a much grander and much more incomprehensible scale. They are volatile, edgy, unpredictable characters and are a boon for investing a scene with tension, because a viewer never knows what the Borderline will do next or when he will next explode. This personality has been called the "as if" personality-as in, “it is as if they suddenly went crazy!” George describes Martha's unpredictable behavior and rationale when, after the visiting biology professor expresses a polite interest in their abstract expressionist painting, George replies, "It's a pictorial representation of the order of Martha's mind." Snide, maybe, but perhaps accurate. Martha herself is not unaware of the volatility that characterizes their household. She freely admits that "it gets pretty bouncy around here.” Borderline Personalities will keep life bouncy, rocky, and fraught with anxiety. The stories of these characters will never be labeled smooth sailing. A friend of Mrs. Parker describes her erratic lifestyle: "You're an artist, Dorothy. Sometimes artists lose their balance."

Borderline characters in films are a mongrel batch. It is a melting pot universe with crossover personalities well on their way to (if not the real thing) their own personal hells. There are the lethal ones (Fatal Attraction, Misery, Fear); the mother-monsters (The Grifters, Mommie Dearest); a boatload of drunks and substance abusers (Leaving Las Vegas, The Lost Weekend, Under The Volcano, The Man with the Golden Arm, Pulp Fiction, Drugstore Cowboy, Bad Lieutenant). And then there are those who simply seem lost (Blue Velvet, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, A Woman Under the Influence).

The Borderline’s self destruction is a repetitive self-destruction. Self-mutilation, suicide attempts, and monumental substance abuse are merely ways to garner attention and express anger, or sometimes are used to numb themselves from themselves. In Fear (a shameless but solid knock-off of Fatal Attraction for teens), David slugs himself until he is bruised and carves the name of his beloved into his chest. Both Mrs. Parker and Martha prove highly self-destructive-abusing alcohol to such a degree as to make a sailor blush. Alex's (Fatal Attraction) first recourse when she doesn't get her way is to slash her wrists . . . and it works-Dan stays the night. Borderline characters, although they attempt suicide, are rarely intent on truly killing themselves. Suicide threats usually turn out to be just that, or, at the most, truncated efforts. They signal not so much a wish to die as they do depression over what the Borderline character perceives as abandonment. Borderlines need to counteract the despair by forcing someone to care, forcing rescue. Alex is very successful in this. When Dan goes to leave, she feels abandoned, so she slashes her wrists-not, of course, waiting for him to leave-and he stays and looks after her, spending another night.

Mrs. Parker also takes to slashing her wrists, but only after calling up room service and ordering dinner sent to her rooms-thus ensuring she will be found before it's too late. It is not a desire to cease to live, but a clarion cry to draw attention to her life and the misery that defines it. Mrs. Parker, hardly born yesterday, is quick to exploit it. At F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s apres-midi she is confronted with a request: "Do honor us with one of your darling poems." Dorothy swills some liquor and humorlessly recites Resume-a poem detailing the most popular avenues of killing oneself. The assemblage is left stunned as she leaves the bandstand and heads to the bushes for casual sex.

Martha, at least within the time confines of the film, has not tried overt suicide, but she certainly displays other multi-fold talents for obtaining attention. As George says: "there isn't an abomination award going that you haven't won." She does enjoy doing battle, after all, and she and George have their confrontation to the death. Both are left annihilated.

Misery
Mrs. Parker counsels: "A dependable fact of life, is everything is always worse than you thought it would be."
Profound emptiness is one of the key components of the Borderline character. Alex is so desperately alone that she insists on carrying Dan's baby in the hopes that it will force him into building a life with her. This unsettling emptiness is chronic. Borderlines are stricken with boredom and lack of fulfillment; Martha is literally screaming to be set free. Their lives, they feel, have been disappointing to themselves and to others. Mrs. Parker feels that she is a failure as a wife, a friend, and a writer; Martha feels she has squandered the one advantage that she had (being the dean's daughter) by marrying a man who wasn't ambitious enough. Their lives (so they feel) are predestined toward misery.

This emptiness endemic to the Borderline is perhaps no more poignantly portrayed than with Martha and her son, a "blue-haired and blond-eyed" heir to the couple’s misery. She is alone, trapped and strangled in her "vile sewer of a marriage." Having completely pushed away her husband and unable to bear children, she has (with George's complicity) created an imaginary child, “Sonny Jim.” When George commits the coup de grace and decides that Sonny Jim has died in a car accident, Martha is so broken and wrenched she can no longer fight. Disconsolate, she laments, "Who said, ‘yes, this will do?' Who made the mistake of loving me? I must be punished for it.”

As with the Histrionic Personality, the thought pattern of the Borderline is global-they think in the general, the extreme, and they don’t concern themselves with nuance. The Borderline is not wont to ponder-instead, they react. They weigh and consider issues; they flit impetuously from thought to unconnected thought. And as seen in the Histrionic, deep reflection is avoided, because it usually proves uncomfortable. The Borderline is only too aware of the constant state of misery in which they live. To dwell, to stop for a moment to consider it, would prove devastatingly painful. An initial look at Rob Reiner and Stephen King’s Misery might indicate the title is being used to describe Paul’s (James Caan) condition for most of the movie. On closer examination it is not only the misery of the snared novelist that is of King’s concern, but also the internal misery of the isolated woman (Kathy Bates).
Splitting
The most apparent behavior of Borderline characters is, customarily, their absolute division of the world and all its contents into extremes-all good and all bad. There are no fuzzy boundary lines here, no subtle distinctions. Interesting, since the criterion that defines them is filled with fuzzy boundaries and few subtle distinctions. This is what psychologist’s call splitting. These characters can seem to have different personalities with different people at different times or they can seem to run hot and cold with the same person within any given moment. Primitive impulses take over. One moment they are throwing kisses, the next kitchen knives (“It’s as if they went nuts!”). One minute Alex is declaring her undying love for Dan, the next she is screaming that she wants him dead. This happens no more notably than when she leaves him a cassette tape recording. At first she is a woman in love, cooing, "I feel you, I taste you, I think you, I touch you." But Alex's monologue rapidly dissolves into a hate-filled diatribe as she graphically details what she imagines to be his sexual preference for other males. If he does not love her, it must be because he's a homosexual. At F. Scott Fitzgerald’s garden party, a dashing young man who has made a bet that he could make her smile approaches Mrs. Parker. She dismisses him with a scathing remark. Still, he pursues her. She then interrupts his banter about his family's bird sanctuary with a long sloppy kiss and leads him into the topiary for a passionate quickie. She emerges, no longer amorous but instead acerbic. She tells him, "Don't worry, Roger. I don't review rehearsals," and then leaves him. Martha, too, can swing pendulously from scalding to freezing on a dime. One moment she tells George, "You make me puke," and the next she's leaping on him, girlishly begging for a wet kiss. "Once a month we get good," George says after finally being pushed to the limits of his endurance, when he has finally given up hope of ever finding the "girl beneath the barnacles, the little miss, that the touch of goodness will bring to bloom again." The relationships in which the Borderline becomes enmeshed can be exasperating. George simply has had his fill and declares a personal war.

The defenses of the Borderline Personality are very primitive. Their transference’s are strong and anything but ambivalent. They idealize people, bequeathing unto them godlike virtue and power. Alex's attachment (though unearned) is unshakable. They may as quickly devalue others as weak and contemptible. Martha maintains an unceasing tirade against George and embarks on a spiteful quest to cuckold him, not so much for her own pleasure as for George's humiliation.

Borderlines also tend to shift their allegiance from one person or group to another with great ease and frequency. With Martha, George is History; the new professor is Biology. She devalues George: "I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.” She calls him, alternately and repeatedly, "cluck", "dumbbell", "simp", "muff monkey", "old bog", and "swampy.” The new professor, nevertheless, is "good-looking, well built," and doesn't "need any props . . . no fake guns for him." She calls him "baby" and "stuff.” But she is ruthlessly quick to do an about face, calling her once-idealized new friend "a houseboy" and George the "one man in my life that's made me happy." Mrs. Parker sobs when she loses her job at Vanity Fair: "I've wrecked my career. Kindly direct me to hell." She is so glorious a part of the Algonquin Round Table that she is its poster child; yet when asked of it later, she responds by claiming that they were "a bunch of loud mouths showing off . . . they're shit, really. A funny thing to say about your best friends . . . they should have called it the dingy decade." Her only true allegiance is to her own misery.

It aids understanding to imagine Borderline Personalities as often living in their own little impermeable bubbles of despair. Because of their tendency to polarize the world into the idealized or the devalued, they regularly appear to be always in a crisis, always in some sort of dilemma. George: "Unless you're carrying on like a hyena, you're not having a good time.” Of Mrs. Parker: "Your passion for unhappiness is goddamned endless." Alex is a whirlwind, either taking Dan with her on a vertiginous weekend during which she cannot even get into an elevator without having sex, or stalking him-abducting his daughter and killing the family rabbit. There is no calm, except when she is left alone, and then her feelings of abandonment all but leave her catatonic with emptiness.

Relationships
The relationships of the Borderline are overwhelmingly patterned by instability. This is because of their habit of alternating idealization and devaluation. They pick you up, they throw you down. Simply put, they are exhausting to be around. "I'm numb enough that I can take you when we're alone," George tells Martha. But he is more patient (or more spineless) than most.

Borderline characters may be prone to panic when they get close to another person-they fear being engulfed, being totally controlled. Mrs. Parker's friends can see her predicament, perhaps with leveler heads than hers: "if a man pursued her, she wouldn't be interested, but let a man pursue another woman, and she will fall deliriously in love. Claws flashing, tears falling." Yet when they feel separate, they experience the trauma of abandonment. They feel both dependent and hostile, because they fear immanent abandonment whenever they do feel dependent. "George and Martha. Sad, sad, sad," Martha sadly muses. "Some night, some stupid liquor-ridden night, I'll push him too far, break his back or push him away, which is what I deserve." For her part, Mrs. Parker refers to herself as "Mrs. Parker” even though her marriage to Mr. Parker ended decades earlier. She cannot tolerate being a “Miss.” Perhaps most telling in this case: "I could kiss you," she tells Benchley, "but I'm afraid I'd lose you."

Borderline Personalities cannot bear to be alone and usually are on a frantic search for companionship because being involved (no matter how unsatisfactory the actual relationship) is infinitely better than being left to themselves. Neither closeness nor distance is comfortable. Alex knew full well from the start that Dan was married, and even made him promise that he was discrete. She, of course, turned out to be anything but. She clings unreasonably and inappropriately to Dan, attempting everything from suicide to having his baby in order to get him to stay by her side. The Borderline Personality often takes in strangers as friends (Leaving Las Vegas, The Man With the Golden Arm, The Lost Weekend), or they are frequently promiscuous (Blue Velvet, Fear, Fatal Attraction). Whether friends or bed partners (most often both), they form frighteningly strong connections to people they have just met. Martha lures the biology professor: "encourage me," she begs him, shaking her already shaky physique. She eventually beds him and, like clockwork, emasculates him: "You're certainly a flop in some departments." Mrs. Parker seems to have found the root of all her problems: "I wish I'd never learned to take off my clothes." Their relationships are brief but intense. They tend to begin sexual conduct early in dating (if they haven’t already taken care of it after the first “hello”). Mrs. Parker takes one look at Charles MacArthur and declares, "I may have him mounted.”

The Borderline’s black and white outlook applies likewise with love. There is nothing of courtship or the falling into it. Borderline characters are either in love or in hate. Alex is honestly surprised when Dan wonders why she is trying to hurt him-this after she has assaulted, threatened, and deceived him. She genuinely has no idea what he's talking about: "Why are you so hostile," she says. "I'm not your enemy. I love you." Mrs. Parker announces (quite accurately): "I'm going to wear my heart on my sleeve like a wet, red stain." She falls impulsively and tempestuously in love. "Would you like a drink before I kiss you?" she says to Charles MacArthur when she meets him. The next morning she announces to the Round Table that they are engaged, yet she derides him almost immediately after consummating their passion. She calls MacArthur, "Mr. Vomit.” Her husband, Alan, is referred to as "a queer.”

This denigration is usually automatic. It is a primitive devaluation. Little, if any, thought goes into the impulse or the consequences of it. These personalities readily find faults and flaws in others, especially mates (or prospects thereto), to bolster their own low sense of self-worth. They find it important to program failure from the start so as not to be blamed or surprised when they yet again crawl from the wreckage of a spoiled relationship: a “vicious circle” of abandonment/engulfment/salvation/annihilation.
Diminished Sense of Self
Borderline characters perceive the population as being either nurturing (attachment figures) or, by default, as being hateful. If hateful, others are seen as sadistic creatures bent on depriving them of the security Borderlines need and representing the dark, foreboding thunderhead of the always looming abandonment they so fear. Again a polarization into all good, all bad. This incapability to observe the complexity of others is mirrored in their views of themselves. They have difficulty with their identity integration, which is to say their experience of themselves is likely to be full of inconsistency and discontinuity. They are at a loss, generally, when they are asked to describe themselves. Alex is truly shocked when her spite and violence are not seen as signs of love. Martha describes herself as an Earth Mother when she is in fact the farthest thing from the nurturing, fecund symbol of enveloping warmth. Annie (Misery) does not understand why her guest/prisoner Paul Sheldon is so ungrateful at her need to take a sledgehammer to his feet and crush them. She is, after all, only trying to help him be a better writer.

The Borderline Personality is repeatedly incapable of complex, ambiguous emotions or unconditional love. When asked to describe important people in their lives, they can only manage some sort of global, reductive description. Mrs. Parker says of her mother: "I suppose she loved me, kept me warm, fed me roughage. Truth is, I can never remember being loved." Her psychiatrist tells her, "It's good remembering." She shoots back, "I'm not remembering. I'm guessing." Both Martha and Alex treat their respective objects of obsession alternately as omnipotent figures-the life's blood of their lives-or as worthless, ineffectual, impotent weaklings.

Borderlines are hard pressed to manage an evocative, humanizing description, because they cannot perceive it. Being unable to grasp the innate complexity of people (especially their own complexity) causes them to react with hostility if the subject is ever broached. They have unstable and distorted self-images, and their ability to acknowledge their own pathology is limited. They may seem resistant to offers of help because they don't see a need for help. They see no reason to perform any soul searching or changing of their ways because they simply don't see a problem. In fact, they perceive offers of help as attacks, or at the very least, as criticism. They have never known differently, never had a different character type with which to compare normalcy. They lack the emotional concept of empathy and have no idea what mature defenses must feel like. They see no ambiguity in their environment, and the ability to defer gratification is not one that would occur to them. They simply do not see what all the fuss is about. In fact, they may look on those who don't share these personality traits as abnormal.

The instability and mercurial volatility of their perception of others is reflected in the control they exhibit over their impulses. They have little of it. They are prone to sudden and startling mood swings and their behavior is erratic and unpredictable. Some of the greatest and most startling moments in the history of film are the result of such frenzy: Annie and her mallet, Alex’s “I won’t be ignored,” Joan’s “No more wire hangers,” Dorothy Vallens and her S/M lovemaking. When it is anger, it is intense and almost always inappropriate (usually these outbursts are volcanic, but short-lived). Such impulsive behavior is potentially damaging, and not just socially or amorously-like their lack of control over anger, Borderlines similarly lack control over impulses related to eating, alcohol, drugs, and sex. They are fond of binges, which fits in well with their penchant for self-destruction. In nearly all the films involving Borderline Personalities, the characters are shown as having tried or about to try suicide (razor, bottle, pills, whatever) if not homicide. Their self-destruction is a way of life. Both Mrs. Parker and Martha drink whiskey by the tumble full. Mrs. Parker only wants enough money "to keep body and soul apart.” As for sex, Martha is on the biology professor like a poodle on a stew bone. Mrs. Parker can’t be bothered waiting for a bedroom-she drags men into the bushes at a garden party. Alex cannot wait to get Dan into the bedroom and sexually engages him over a sink of dirty dishes.
Guiltless
It is important to keep in mind when creating Borderlines that they are in fact Borderline and not psychotic. An important difference here is that Borderlines do have a hold on reality, albeit perhaps distorted. Though both make plausible lethal killers, there is a good deal of psychological terrain between Alex (Fatal Attraction) and Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs). A significant difference is that Borderlines usually do not find anything wrong with their behavior. Though they are aware of their pathology, they think that it’s justified. Mrs. Parker is not unaware of her behavior, and laments: "the years I've wasted being a party girl and a smart ass." Martha is also aware of who she is: "I'm loud and I'm vulgar and I wear the pants in the family 'cause someone's got to. I'm not a monster." Alex is only too aware of her actions. She keeps insisting that she will play fair if Dan will. Her spiraling into psychosis leads her to believe that Dan is somehow avoiding his responsibility. She feels her escalating violence is justified and forewarned. In contrast, Hannibal Lecter knows very well that he is the personification of evil.

Because of this lack of flexibility or precision in their thinking, Borderlines rarely lives up to their abilities and potential. This too becomes a marked and defining trait-the tendency to fail at careers. Martha does little but harangue and decry her lot in life, thinking that she has blown the opportunity of a lifetime being the dean’s daughter and marrying a less than ambitious and stagnant man such as George. Mrs. Parker also feels she could have amounted to more: "I know better than to expect anything from myself. . . . I fall in love with married men, but I do it on purpose. I drink too much, because I'm thirsty."

Backstory
Borderline Personalities learn the behavior that classifies them early in life, from their families . . . families in which catastrophe is a way of life, where no one pays attention unless you are threatening mayhem. Trauma, especially incest, is often now thought of as instrumental in the formation of the Borderline Personality (a strong case for why women are diagnosed more often than men).

Clinically speaking, the Borderline Personality is fixated at the separation-individuation process. They are trapped in the notorious “terrible twos.” They have been frozen at the time when a degree of autonomy has been attained, yet the individual still needs reassurance that the parents remain available and powerful. The mother figure may discourage separation out of fear of abandonment (most likely being Borderline or Narcissistic herself). Or she refuses to be there when the child needs to regress after some independence has been achieved. The mother has aggravated issues with her children growing up and this plight does not go unfelt by the child. As the child reaches for independence, it feels the fear of abandonment. The mother (consumed in her own Narcissistic or Borderline Personality) does nothing to create for the child an internal image of mother. And since this internal sense of motherhood (security) is vital to our growth as individuals-it leaves the borderline child ill prepared if not unable to face separation.

It is not surprising that regression comes easily to the Borderline Personality. Martha often reverts to baby-speak with George when she needs affection. She might be sitting on his lap just before throwing herself into a rage and declaring war unto the death. "Daddy knows how to run things," she says, still the spoiled daddy's girl. Annie (Misery) uses a similar baby-speak with phrases such as “Mister Man” when addressing Paul. Dorothy Vallens (Blue Velvet) exposes her moments of “lost little girl” in the middle of sex.

Ultimately, it is an issue of the child who becomes confused by the conflicting message of the mother who has difficulty with internalizing nurturing relationships. These states of confusion will oftentimes create a depressive reaction in the child coupled with intense feelings of emptiness, rage, and fear. Many times the child will experience psychotic fragmentation as it desperately attempts to ward off feelings of panic due to an internal terror of being annihilated or smothered. Unfortunately, the negative experience of one parent is seldom counterbalanced by a positive experience of the other. In addition to the mother’s pathological behavior, the father is generally attributed with being distant, uncaring, and sadistic in his control. Purgatory appears to be the defining state for the Borderline child. Trauma-rich psychodynamic conditions of child rearing appear to be coupled with a high degree of child physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, and neglect. The duration and intensity of the abuse will have a major impact on the development of pathology. As a result of developmental and abusive conditions, the development of the Borderline individual is one of extreme complexity with no one factor contributing the definitive psychological blow.
The Arc Of A Borderline Film Character
In Fatal Attraction, we first meet Alex Forrest when Dan Gallagher first meets her-at a cocktail party given by the publishing firm that employs Dan as legal council and Alex as an associate editor. With her leonine mane, Alex is the picture of confident (if predatory) female ambition. At their second meeting, the sexual attraction between Alex and Dan becomes blatant, and it’s not long before Alex seduces Dan (after he assures her that he is discreet) and they are copulating over a sink full of dirty dishes. Dan soon discovers that Alex may have a slight problem with abandonment issues. He leaves her apartment the next morning, prompting her to call him angrily: "What happened? I woke up and you weren't here. I hate that!" She manages to coerce him into spending yet another day together. "You just don't give up, do you?" he says. So he gives in, even at the expense of spending the day in the country with his wife, Beth. When Dan again tries to leave, Alex attacks him verbally and physically-literally kicking him out of her bed. Before he can leave, she falls sobbing into his arms with slashed wrists. The first cracks in Alex's fragile psyche have become apparent.

In Act Two, Dan tries delicately to extricate himself from the situation, but he has little luck. Alex shows up to his office uninvited. She is contrite and apologetic. She seems marginally lucid. She blames her self-destructive gestures on the fact that "it was a bad time and everything was coming to a crisis." She then invites Dan to the opera. He declines.

But Alex (as she proclaims later) "won't be ignored." She is increasingly falling across the line into psychosis. Her life is empty. She is becoming dangerously bitter and resentful. She has outbursts of (alternately) obsessive clinging neediness and violent, vitriolic tirades of undiluted rage. Her time at home is spent listening to Madame Butterfly alone and crying-that and repeatedly calling Dan's home number only to hang up when his wife answers. When she finally gets Dan to agree to see her, he asks her why she is trying to hurt him. She is honestly shocked at the accusation: "I'm not!" she says, "I love you!" When he demands that she put an end to their "imaginary affair," she plays her trump card: she tells him that she is pregnant.

Dan doesn't know whether or not to believe her, but he knows he must end all communication with Alex. He changes his phone number and refuses to see her at work. When Alex can't get the operator to give her the new phone number (despite her intimidating use of salty language), she infiltrates his home by posing as a prospective homebuyer and gets the new number from Beth. Dan counters this by moving out to the country. Alex matches him by dousing his car with acid and completely ruining it. She also gives him an audiocassette that telescopes her descent into madness, her crossing the Borderline into full-fledged delusions. She starts the tape by telling him how consumed she is by him: how she can feel him, taste him, think him. It’s not too much later that she's calling him and telling him that she hates him-perfectly encapsulating the Borderline's inability to think in anything but extremes. They must either idealize or devalue.

In Act Three, Alex graduates to a full-blown psychotic. She breaks into Dan's home and cooks the family’s pet rabbit. For dessert she abducts his daughter. Dan, finally having had enough, confesses to his wife and then goes to confront Alex. Things get physical right from the start and they brawl in Alex's apartment. She comes at him with a butcher knife and, though he manages to disarm her, he imprudently leaves the weapon with her.

With the police involved and Beth forgiving Dan his transgression, all seems on track for a return to a happy normal life for the Gallaghers. Unfortunately, the police can't find Alex, and she shows up as Beth is drawing a bath. Alex, absent-mindedly self-mutilating her thigh with the aforementioned knife, has broken from reality. She questions Beth in her own home: "What are you doing here? Why are you here?" Alex's attempted homicidal rampage is cut short when Dan drowns her in the bathtub, and, when that proves not to be enough (she wasn’t kidding about not being ignored), Beth shoots her dead.
QUALITIES AND QUALIFICATIONS THAT DEFINE THE BORDERLINE PERSONALITY

They have consistent patterns of instability in their relationships.

They commonly complain of depression and boredom.

They have very little control over their impulses.

They have a fragile and unstable self-image and affect.

They exert a lot of energy avoiding abandonment, whether real or imaginary.

Their relationships tend to be intense and short-lived.

They alternately idealize and devalue others, particularly their mates.

They suffer from Identity Disturbance (a distorted or disturbed sense of self).

They are recklessly impulsive which can prove harmful to themselves and others (i.e., they are prone to substance abuse, binge-eating, shopping sprees, careless sex, etc.)

They are prone to indulging in suicidal gestures and threats.

They are prone to self-mutilation.

They have violent, eruptive mood swings.

They are very reactive; the slightest stimuli can send them into intense bouts of irritability, depression, anxiety, etc.

They experience feelings of chronic emptiness.

They cannot control their anger, and it is usually inappropriate and often quite intense.

They are prone to acting out physically (i.e., fighting).

They tend to be prone to paranoia.

They often have severe dissociative symptoms.

They make excessive emotional demands in close relationships.

They have difficulty tolerating ambivalence.

They have great difficulty with being alone.

They tend to be non-reflective.

They tend to lead chaotic lives.

They allow themselves to be used by others.

They may experience intermittent psychotic delusions.

They demand gratification.

They prefer action to verbalization and reflection.

Diagnosis is more common in females than in males.

They always seem to be in a state of crisis.

Their behavior is highly unpredictable.

They rarely live up to their potential (because their lives are too erratic).

They tend toward promiscuity in an attempt to circumvent being alone.

They place people in polar extremes, either all good or all bad.

They tend to dismiss complexity in theirs and others' personalities.

They tend to globalize and minimize; they tend to reduce to a single characteristic.

They don't have the capacity to defer gratification.

They don't feel that they have a problem-it's the only reality that they have ever known.

NOTEWORTHY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BORDERLINE PERSONALITY

SPEECH
Usually will reflect the mood swings of the individual. When highly depressed-they will have flat, undefined speech that is global in nature. Non-specific in structure. With feelings of abandonment-they are loud, accusatory, and known to rage. When regressed-they are childlike. They can be manipulative in order to minimize abandonment issues. Sometimes they are psychotic in nature-with loose associations that don't relate. "The television is on, let's get married!"

PROFESSIONS
Difficulty with maintaining a professional life. Usually not reaching their potential. Artistic fields such as acting, painting, writing-jobs that are means to managing their mental stress and chronic boredom. Usually not found in scientific or engineering fields.

DRESS
Again, reflective of moods. Typical example: goes out shopping, bored with what they buy and returns it all the next day-or buys ten belts because they can't make up their mind. Flamboyant or overstated. Can manifest depression.

HEALTH
Hypocondriacal. Unreal views about body. Eating disorders. Hysterical conversions. Substance abuse. Sexual addictions. Self-mutilating.

POPULAR CLICHÉS OF THE BORDERLINE PERSONALITY
Moody.
The Live Wire.
The Short Fuse.
The Slut.
The Nut Case.
Unreliable.
Fly by night.
Capricious.
Treacherous.
Unbalanced.

SIMILAR PERSONALITY STYLES OF THE BORDERLINE PERSONALITY
THE ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY
THE HISTRIONIC PERSONALITY
THE PARANOID PERSONALITY
THE NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY

VIEWING SUGGESTIONS OF THE BORDERLINE PERSONALITY

Bad Lieutenant (1992) - Drama, 98, Rated NC-17.
For Harvey Keitel as the Lieutenant.

Blue Velvet (1986) - Mystery, 120, Rated R.
For Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy Vallens.

Drugstore Cowboy (1989) - Drama, 100, Rated R.
For Matt Dillon as Bob.

Fatal Attraction (1987) - Thriller/Romance, 119, Rated R.
Glenn Close as Alex Forrest. Close was Oscar nominated for acting, as was the screenplay.

Fear (1996) - Romance/Thriller, 95, Rated R.
Fatal Attraction for teenagers. Mark Whalberg the loose cannon, David.

The Grifters (1990) - Crime, 113, Rated R.
For signs of Borderline in Angelica Huston as Lily Dillon. Huston was nominated for an Academy Award along with the taught screenplay.

Leaving Las Vegas (1995) - Drama, 112, Rated R.
Nicholas Cage's Oscar winning performance as Ben Sanderson. Oscar nominated for Figgis' writing.

The Lost Weekend (1945) - Drama, 101, No rating.
Ray Milland as Don Brinman. Won an Academy Award for the writing.

The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) - Drama, 119, No rating.
Frank Sinatra as Frankie Machine. Sinatra was Oscar nominated for Best Actor.

Misery (1990) - Horror, 107, Rated R.
Kathy Bates in her Academy Award winning role as Annie Wilkes.

Mommie Dearest (1981) - Biography, 129, Rated PG.
For Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford.

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) - Drama/Biography, 125, Rated R.
Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker.

Pulp Fiction (1994) - Drama/Crime/Comedy, 154, Rated R.
Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace. Won the Oscar for writing.

The Rose (1979) - Musical, 134, Rated R.
For Bette Midler as Rose. Signs of both the Narcissist and the Borderline.

Under the Volcano (1984) - Drama, 109, Rated R.
Oscar nominated Albert Finney as Geoffrey.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) - Drama, 129, No rating.
George and Martha. Burton and Taylor were both nominated for Oscars, as was the writing.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974) - Drama, 155, Rated R.
Gena Rowlands as Mable Longhetti.