Borderline’s Partner: Some Enter Healthy, Exit Mentally Ill (Starts 12:10)
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2022-08-06

(Starts 12:10) Borderline requires object constancy, pushes all her partners to develop introject constancy: she is too painful as an external object. Interacting with a BPD external object requires high-effort coping.

To ensure object constancy, the borderline needs to freeze the partner, avoid any change and dynamic, thus provoking in the partner engulfment anxiety and avoidant behaviors. 

The partner then reacts with narcissistic defenses and evolved introject anxiety. 

To ensure introject constancy, the partner needs to avoid the external object, provoking in the borderline abandonment anxiety and her approach.

The partner responds by trying to secure the borderline’s object constancy (approach).

This leads to approach-avoidance repetition compulsion.

Comment about Freud

Freud distinguished anaclitic from narcissistic object. He was wrong because he assumed the existence of a self and that the narcissist possesses a cathected self. Both assumptions are wrong.

He also equated the roles and importance of the mother and the father in the formation of anaclitic objects in later life. Wrong again. Only the mother counts. 

The narcissistic has only internal objects, some of which are self-states. He cathects all of them. Some of these internal objects are anaclitic (maternal) objects. 

Self-states are introjects. In personality disorders with introject constancy, attachment to the introjects creates rigidity. 

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