BPD - Partners

'The Borderline Personality: vision & healing'

[A book by Nathan Schwartz-Salant]

"I choose to emphasize another factor that is crucial for the incarnation of the self (soul?) but usually disregarded in the psychoanalytic literature: the borderline person has split off and denied imaginal perceptions - the imagination becomes either unavailable or persecutory. The many clinical illustrations in this work reveal various manifestations of the borderline patient's sight, which is split off from his or her normal consciousness; this sight scans the therapist during a therapy session and patients suffer from its absence. Such sight is rooted in the power of the imagination to perceive unconscious processes accurately, and its recovery is an essential element in restoring the self to a functional significance... The imaginal process through which accurate perceptions of affective states and attitudes in other people may be discovered is a constituent part of every human being and probably functional at birth. It partakes of both psychic and physical life and draws upon kinesthetic experiences, feelings, and mentation. This mode of perception involves the thrusting forth of one's images into outer forms (Corbin, 1969 pp. 218ff) and offers discovery of what one would normally choose not to know... The therapist embarked upon the venture of recapturing the patient's imaginal sight cannot afford to overlook the reality distortions that afflict the borderline person. Unless we first deal with the way the world is split for the borderline patient (for example, into delusional "good" and "bad" objects) our attempts at reconnecting the patient with imaginal reality will only reinforce a delusional approach to reality. [From 'The Borderline Personality: Vision and Healing' by Nathan Schwartz-Salant]

Just roaming through the various disorders -psychopathy, depersonalization, alexithymia, borderline, etc- it seems the imaginal is often unavailable and a mimicry takes its place. Faced with such an absence of the imaginal, these patients are often better suited to somatically based therapies, which may in time allow for imaginal perceptions to arise, and facilitate the possibility of a classical psychoanalytic therapy.

The task of Therapy

The task of therapy is to return personal feelings (anxiety, desire, confusion, boredom, misery) to the specific images which hold them. Therapy [of the imaginal] attempts to individualize the face of each emotion: the body of desire, the face of fear, the situation of dispair. Feelings are imagined into their details. This move is similar to that of the imagist theory of poetry (Hulme 1924), where any emotion not differentiated by a specific image is inchoate, common, and dumb, remaining both sentimentally personal and yet collectively unindividualized."

[From - 'Archetypal Psychology: a brief account' by James Hillman]

Restoration of the imagination

"This practice is rooted in Jung's view of the psyche as inherently purposeful: all psychic events whatsoever have a telos. Archetypal psychology, however, does not enunciate this telos. Purposefulness qualifies psychic events, but it is not to be literalized apart from the images in which it inheres".

"Ours could be called an image-focused therapy. Thus the dream as an image or bundle of images is paradigmatic, as if we were placing the entire psychotherapuetic procedure within the context of a dream. It is not, however, that dreams as such become the focus of therapy but that all events are regarded from the dream-viewpoint, as if they were images, metaphorical expressions. The dream is not in the patient and something he or she makes; the patient is in the dream and is doing or being made by its fiction."

"Animating the image -that is the task today. No longer is it a question of symbolic contents….Over a hundred years ago Freud brought us back to the old traditions of symbolism and the tradition of dream meanings; then Jung explored these symbolisms and meanings even more widely and deeply.

Both Freud and Jung made a move that we no longer want to repeat. They both translated the images…into crystallized symbolic meanings. They didn't let what appeared express itself enough, but moved towards satisfying the rationalizing -and often frightened- dayworld mind. "This means that."

"Stick to the image" has become a golden rule of archetypal psychology's method, and this because the image is the primary psychological datum". [James Hillman]

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"What I have to say in this present chapter is extremely simple. Although it comes out of my psychoanalytical experience I would not say that it could have come out of my psychoanalytical experience of two decades ago, because I would not then have had the technique to make possible the transference movements that I wish to describe. For instance, it is only in recent years that I have become able to wait and wait for the natural evolution of the transference arising out of the patient's growing trust in the psychoanalytic technique and setting, and to avoid breaking up this natural process by making interpretations. It will be noticed that I am talking about the making of interpretations and not about interpretations as such. It appals me to think how much deep change I have prevented or delayed in patients in a certain classification category by my personal need to interpret. If only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever. I think I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or become aware of it with acceptance." [From - 'Playing and Reality', by Donald W. Winnicott, 1971]