Just like the young woman who came to see me for her “unbearable suffering at twilight,” we may have to go as far as to conceptualize as an everyday condition a borderline state of humanity—without humane melancholy—that hints at the unavoidable occurrence of a form that is still unknown to us. This event is not part of the past, nor can it be imagined as something to come. Can we still call an “occurrence” what is experienced as a slow disintegration of time and the insidious advance, perceptible at every moment, of a deadline that has already begun? Is the “planetary man” the person who experiences psychically, in his life, the geological evolution of the earth and of species? Mutation is infinitesimal, and this is surely why it assumes the appearance of a spellbound passion—perhaps one that would take the form of a female Christ. This female Christ is a mutant who, through her/his “suffering,” causes the inhuman to arise in humanity. This physically psychic suffering is her/his flesh. The incarnation is the work of disintegration of time that produces the reverse side of the face. That’s what the incarnation of the inhuman is.
What this young woman, Cynthia, called a “borderline state of humanity” was certainly not without reference to her own family history; her paternal and maternal grandparents were victims of Nazi extermination, which her mother, born in a concentration camp, had miraculously escaped. But today, as far as she herself was concerned, it was as though the Holocaust were neither in the past nor in the future but were taking place in that unavoidable time that the everyday can no longer restrain. And nothing was holding together: the stitches were unraveling before her eyes. Can we speak of “the present” and “the everyday” when reality no longer has the slightest substance and nothing comes along but decomposed time? It was not the arrival of evening that Cynthia dreaded. Although she had no memory of childhood anxiety at twilight, and although now she had come to anticipate a “powerful catastrophe,” she nonetheless knew that such a catastrophe would not occur in the world or in her life. The “borderline state of humanity” was, as it were, fixed backwards and yet without a past. Surely, then, being deprived of the anxiety of a catastrophe is a sort of proof of the inhuman, just like the inability to feel fear or dread, which are human feelings. And so the “suffering” that tormented her was like flayed skin that has to be rubbed all the time so that one can feel alive.
In holding on to her suffering in spite of herself—perhaps so that she would not disappear—she was taking the suffering for the sufferer! For Cynthia could not speak of her suffering, in the sense that she was unaware of its contents. But as it spoke, this suffering that “disfigured” her took on the compulsive aspect of rubbing the skin “in order to bleed,” and it was this that made her “hold up” and “stand straight and keep moving.” There could be no rest, according to her, for one who was on the lookout. And for this reason the suffering did not permit the carelessness of forgetting, in the same way that it granted her “lucidity” when she was unable to sleep: it made her “translucent” to others who wandered around like automata without gestures, without words, without faces, able to communicate with one another only through a dumb-show of long-lost feelings. These “automata” were horribly cruel, yet at the same time they slipped away from her on the street, in the subway, outside cafés.
A “borderline state of humanity” is therefore not a term one would apply to suffering that is inhuman because it is psychically unbearable. If human beings suffer psychically—suffer because there is a psyche—this uncontrollable suffering is that of the consciousness and the memory which we cannot do without as long as we are of human flesh. We cannot keep ourselves from seeing what is human come undone all around us. And indeed, this suffering is none other than what is endured in the passion of the living Christ on the cross. Is it a matter of saving an alliance between man and God, or, in so doing, of revealing the other face of the human—the inhumanity of the human being? The “borderline state of humanity” is the fulcrum at which the grimaces, simulating affects, of anonymous normality tip over into the slow destruction of their appearances. It is also the exhaustion of the dream by the insomnia of cruelty. Could we say, then, that this fulcrum gives the woman the advantage of being more naked than men and of knowing, at the same time, the hope for an animality and the anorexia of death? If the suffering of the psyche was supposed to be, for the woman, the true flesh of her sex, then this “borderline state of humanity” can avail itself of the most intimate acquaintance with the suffering Christ, who is, in some way, the mirror of all the symptoms of the human—the ultimate misshapenness.
As I listened to Cynthia saying these things in her first sessions, it would certainly have been easy for me to recognize in her many of the distinctive features of what is commonly called the “borderline personality.” But her own designation of her “suffering” as a “borderline state of humanity” kept me from making use of the diagnostic markers of a nosographic or transnosographic category and allowed me to grant her speech that time in which existence names itself in the experience of destruction by time. In what way, I thought, is the “borderline personality” the conventional clinical manifestation of this “borderline state of humanity” that could be seen in the suffering of Cynthia, whose intelligence enabled her to say so many things that other patients could not express?
Cynthia knew how she could be and what she could do in order to “trick her way out of” the suffering that, however, she asked me to see by coming to see me. As she said a long time after beginning her psychotherapy, the first time she left my office she had had the thought that in showing me her suffering she had also run the risk of “seeing you as being obscene like the others” or of “annihilating” me. Wouldn’t it have been better to “be deceptive by passing myself off as someone else”? In her work (she was a graphic artist) she was not only well-adjusted and creative, but others sought her out socially. Popular with men, she knew how to dress in a provocative way without agreeing in the least to sexual acting out, which was reserved for the times when she would “freak out” and wanted to avoid being tempted by the hard drugs that would be “appropriate” given her “state.”
Her “normality” was composed of rules and regulations that she observed scrupulously every day “to make it seem as if I’m alive”: taking various pills upon awakening, exercising, dieting, jogging, relaxing in the course of the day. As a result of all this no one would notice anything, and she would look like a human being after all. She said: “You always have to walk quickly in the street, and ahead of other people, because as soon as you slow down and linger people look at you lecherously as a woman and there’s no time to pull yourself together again.” Walking at an energetic pace was the best way to make an impression on others and thereby not to let them become repulsive. “You have to be allergic to other people” and never let them in any way “rob you of the suffering that you’re made of.” But “making believe” in order to live was “exhausting”: basically, there was nothing to feel or to experience, since “everything positive that comes to you from other people isolates you in a solitude.” The human was this mystification of feelings.
We can certainly recognize in Cynthia’s case defense mechanisms such as splitting that are characteristic of borderline personalities. The patient spoke of her intolerance of interpretations on the grounds that they dissociated her from herself (“they make you guilty of an unconscious desire”), and she was distrustful of getting attached to a person—the analyst—who could lure her into annihilation. Although Cynthia claimed that she was capable of remaining alone with her suffering, nothing was more threatening to her than absence, which would “plunge [her] into the void” and make it impossible for her to do anything. On the occasions when this happened she would stay in bed, taking sleeping pills and alcohol to “dissolve all thoughts.” She manifested a predominance of archaic defense mechanisms (like denial) against devastating psychotic anxiety; likewise, shifting projective identifications seemed to make up for the impossibility of symbolization. States of derealization, as evidenced in her sexual acting out—which, for her, meant that she had to apply a real technique of depersonalization to her male partner, who was always unbearable—went along with a denaturation of the object’s genitals in favor of behaviors, which she called “anti-hemorrhagic,” designed to keep her alive.
The threats of annihilation, quite distinct from the disorganization caused by suffering (which, paradoxically, was supposed to safeguard her identity), were also associated with a disidealization of the object—or of a transference—and with depression, when the “figures” in her acting out no longer held together and the coherence of her part-objects could thus no longer be maintained. The suffering, which could be anesthetized for a time, would always return stronger than ever as idealization turned into devaluing. The ascetic regimen of suffering that she so readily undertook on a daily basis suggests obsessional thought processes such as we encounter in certain depressed anorexics; Cynthia, who presented this way when she came to “see” me, believed that this regimen enabled her to preserve an ego identity and a capacity to feel and think.
Cynthia began regular psychotherapy (two sessions a week), but after two months she asked to come three times a week and to use the couch. What happened is that she had quickly realized that her speech could not be the same now that she had “begun dreaming again,” and the face-to-face position made it impossible for her to recall her dreams in the sessions. She said that it would be of little interest to her to tell me things that she had already thought, and she had the feeling that faces could get in the way of recollection. Even though she was afraid that lying down would give her the absolutely detestable feeling of being naked and immobile and would cast her into a lifeless depression—or, conversely, into a “wild craziness”—she preferred to take the risk instead of clinging to the vigilance of her insomniac thought. And it was out of the question for the sessions to make her put on her “best manners,” that is, her techniques of normality. As for me, I had no objection to seeing her three times a week on the couch, but I was concerned that dissociative episodes might arise. Cynthia gave me ample opportunity to observe how well-informed she was about the speech that establishes an analytic situation, and it was for this reason, too, that dissociation in the course of the process could not be ruled out.
The abundant literature on the psychotherapeutic treatment of “borderline personalities” is far from ignoring the difficulties inherent in the countertransference of the analyst, which is, in such cases, elicited all the more because the transferences are often so mobile and volatile from one moment to the next that it can be hard for him to maintain a continuous perception of his identity. We might even wonder whether the theory of the “borderline personality” grew in the favorable soil of ego psychology in order to constitute, simultaneously, its critical challenge and its doctrinal confirmation. The descriptive and explanatory concepts of the metapsychology of borderline states have a yardstick in the form of a theory of the ego and of identifications that makes use of technical awareness of the mechanisms brought into play by the treatment. The recent work of the school of Otto Kernberg (Kernberg et al.,1989) demonstrates to perfection this tendency to view technical difficulties as justifying all sorts of precautions and arrangements to preserve the integrity of the therapeutic identity of the analyst’s ego. Some years ago I investigated this approach to the metapsychology and the treatment of borderline cases (Fédida, 1979), and I attempted to show how the borderline patient had, for a number of analysts, become the clinical projection of ego psychology right down to the details of this paradigm of a negative normality participating in a functional analogy with an ego ideal. These considerations led me to wonder whether “borderline personalities” are not fundamentally captives of the ideological crisis of analytic practice and the crisis affecting the theory of the regression of the ego.
In his seminar on The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, Lacan (1954–1955) devotes several pages to the Dream of Irma’s Injection. His reading of this dream—the “specimen dream” in that it inaugurates a theory of the ego and of the subject of the unconscious—occurs at the point where he is reinterpreting the concept of regression introduced by Freud in Chapter 4 of The Interpretation of Dreams. Among other things, the Dream of Irma’s Injection reveals the “fragmentation of the ego” that may be said to be the condition in the analyst for a regression that makes possible the regression in the patient’s transference:
What happens when we see the subject substituted for by the polycephalic subject?—that crowd I was speaking about last time, a crowd in the Freudian sense, the one discussed in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, made up of the imaginary plurality of the subject, the spreading, the blossoming out of the different identifications of the ego. At first this seems to us like an abolition, a destruction of the subject as such. The subject transformed in this polycephalic image seems to be somewhat acephalic. If there is an image that could represent for us Freud’s notion of the unconscious, it is certainly that of an acephalic subject, a subject who no longer has an ego, who is at the farthest edge, decentered, with regard to the ego, who doesn’t belong to the ego. And yet he is the subject who is speaking, since he’s the one who gives all the characters in the dream their nonsensical lines—whose nonsensical nature is precisely the source of their meaning. [p. 167, translation modified]1
And a little further on:
…it is just when the world of the dreamer is plunged into the greatest imaginary chaos that discourse enters into play, discourse as such, independently of its meaning, since it is a senseless discourse. It then seems that the subject decomposes and disappears. [p. 170]
And finally, in connection with the Wolf Man’s dream of the primal scene:
As in the dream of Irma’s injection, the subject decomposes, fades away, dissociates into its various “me’s.” Likewise, after the Wolf Man’s dream, we witness the real start of the analysis, which makes possible the dissociation inside the subject of a personality so singularly composite that it marks the originality of the style of the case. As you know, the problems left unresolved by this analysis were to be so serious that in the aftermath it would degenerate into psychosis. [p. 176, translation modified]
The transferential crowd of identifications could be what is called the “borderline personality.” And precisely if the “borderline personality” is in some way the clinical projection of a representation of the crowd-ego obeying structural criteria (poor frustration tolerance, psychopathic impulsivity, predominance of splitting mechanisms and defenses such as idealization, omnipotent denial, etc.), these criteria derived from the analysis of the ego and its Freudian metapsychology are compartmentalized here and hence directly observable from the viewpoint of an ego psychology. In other words, Kernberg (among other authors) is inclined to characterize the borderline ego structurally with reference to a metapsychological entity, the ego, defined (especially in the analyst) as ensuring a stable and economically integrated unity of the images of the self, and object relations determined by a mobile libido. We could sum up as follows: the borderline personality is a psychopathological entity that reveals symptomatically an immature and fragmented structure of an ideally normal ego.
Here is where Lacan’s critique of ego psychology is so illuminating. As we have seen in the light of the passages cited above, the fragmentation of the ego by anxiety in dreams expresses, in a sense, these decenterings that give rise to the borderline ego: Isn’t the analyst, as he dreams, in effect the locus (or loci) of borderline identifications or even of borderline processes of ego disorganization? We might even dare to conjecture that nothing is closer to the analyst’s dream than the borderline personality! But here is precisely where what is at issue in the debate comes down to the place granted to this dream (the “kettle with a hole in it”2) in the definition of regressive states of the analyst’s listening capacity (“the dream” beyond this dream) and of the status reserved for Freudian metapsychology.
Let us briefly return to the case of Cynthia. The traits that identify this patient as a borderline personality are based on the psychological observation of the behaviors called for by primary processes. It is true that such observation compares the representations of object and sexual pathology with the analyst’s image of his ego identity and with subjective countertransferential strategies. But to stop at this point would be to ignore a consideration as important as the one this patient communicated in connection with the insomniac suffering of her awareness, of which she later said, associating to a dream of a concentration camp, that she was perhaps a kind of psychic cadaverization paradoxically trying to resurrect and revive her maternal grandmother next to her mother as a baby. And if it is as important for her suffering to be seen by me as it is for her to see if she can destroy me, it is from the time I became her analyst—that is, from the time that her speech made me able to dream a fragmented ego—that her own dreams can shelter the chaos and return fragmentarily to memory in the speech of her sessions.
In the case of Cynthia, as with other borderline patients, as I have often had occasion to note, everything the patient describes under the heading of behavior in the world of external reality in fact belongs to the undreamed remains of the night inserted into waking life. And one of the most difficult tasks in the establishment of the analytic situation with these patients is without a doubt the creation of transferential conditions that will enable the dream to return to nighttime sleep. These transferential conditions are those of a regression, in this case always with hallucinatory intensity; they are also those that I have called, for the analyst, “the site of the stranger”: the demand for the neuter and the breaking into pieces of the ego (see Fédida 1995).
One day Cynthia arrived for her session in a very agitated state. It was July, a little more than two years since the beginning of the treatment, and the day was very warm. When I opened the door I noticed that she was wearing a short, very elegant, but quite revealing summer d ress. She rushed into my office, weeping, and lay down immediately on the couch, covering her legs with a blanket. She then stopped crying and told me about her dream of the previous night, in which she had come for a session only to find the place totally devastated, “as if a bomb had blown up the inside.” Nothing was the way it had been before, but while she expected to see charred walls and “all the inside objects destroyed,” she noticed that the explosion had “stripped off the coverings” and by way of ruins showed “metal and stone structures, very simple.” She asked me whether I planned to leave things that way. In the dream, she suggested that I “keep this emptiness” and above all that I “not replace the objects.” “In my dream, you were there but I didn’t see you, and I knew that you were talking to me but it was my own voice that I heard.”
Immediately afterwards, she said, in the session, that men in the street were starting to come on to her “in a disgusting way, because they don’t even know how to fuck a woman.” This would always happen whenever she slowed her pace; “I have to walk like a metal blade,” she said, and added that she would like to have a child, as in a recent dream: “Why is it forbidden to have a child with one’s father? It seems that fathers are so afraid of incest with their daughters. That’s the only thing that’s not acceptable.” The relationship she had had for some time with a man of her own age suited her as a good incestuous relationship between brother and sister. Finally, speaking of her tearful outburst when she arrived for her hour, she said that when she saw me the thought that I was going to die had come into her mind. She was surprised to have had this sudden thought upon entering, whereas on the outside a similar thought could occur to her without emotion. And she wondered whether her feeling like crying was really connected to that thought or to her unconscious disappointment at always finding things unchanged here. “Maybe it’s because of my dream.” And before the session was over, she added: “Now you have to help me make you disappear, because I think your desire to cure me is getting in the way of the human things that I can experience.”
Fédida, P. (1979). Clinique psychopathologique des cas-limites et métapsychologie du fonctionnement-limite. Psychanalyse à l’Université 5(17):71–96.
——— (1995). Le site de l’étranger—La situation psychanalytique. Paris: P.U.F.
Kernberg, O., Selzer, F., Koenigsberg, M.A., et al. (1989). Psychodynamic Psychotherapy of Borderline Patients. New York: Basic Books.
Lacan, J. (1954–1955). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. S. Tomaselli. New York: Norton, 1991.
1. Translator’s note: The French term for “the ego” is le moi, “the me,” corresponding in its experience-near simplicity to Freud’s das Ich, “the I.” In the passage just cited, the word ego is used, italicized, in the original. Elsewhere, although I have followed convention in translating le moi as “the ego,” it should be kept in mind that the French understand this to be “the me.”
2. Translator’s note: The reference is to a passage from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams discussed by Lacan, 1954–1955, p. 151.