Transference Focused Psychotherapy - Theoretical Model of Borderline Personality

Theoretical Model of Borderline Personality

According to an object relations model, in normal psychological development mental templates of oneself in relation to others, or object representations, become increasingly more differentiated and integrated. The infant’s experience, initially organized around moments of pain (“I am uncomfortable and in need of someone to care for me”) and pleasure (“I am now being soothed by someone and feel loved”), become increasingly integrated and differentiated mental templates of oneself in relation to others. These increasingly mature representations allow for the realistic blending of good and bad, such that positive and negative qualities can be integrated into a complex, multifaceted representation of an individual ("although she is not caring for me at this moment, I know she loves me and will do so in the future"). Such integrated representations allow for the tolerance of ambivalence, difference, and contradiction in oneself and others.

For Kernberg the degree of differentiation and integration of these representations of self and other, along with their affective valence, constitutes personality organization. In a normal personality organization the individual has an integrated model of self and others, allowing for stability and consistency within one’s identity and in the perception of others, as well as a capacity for becoming intimate with others while maintaining one’s sense of self. For example, such an individual would be able to tolerate hateful feelings in the context of a loving relationship without internal conflict or a sense of discontinuity in the perception of the other. In contrast, in Borderline Personality Organization (BPO), the lack of integration in representations of self and other leads to the use of primitive defense mechanisms (e.g., splitting, projective identification, dissociation), identity diffusion (inconsistent view of self and others), and unstable reality testing (inconsistent differentiation between internal and external experience). Under conditions of high stress, borderline patients may fail to appreciate the "whole" of the situation and interpret events in catastrophic and intensely personal ways. They fail to discriminate the intentions and motivations of the other and thus, perceive only threat or rejection. Thus thoughts and feelings about self and others are split into dichotomous experiences of good or bad, black or white, all or nothing.