What Narcissists and Borderlines Teach us About Love

Summary

The article explores the complex relationship between love and mental health, focusing on individuals with Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders, who, despite their deep preoccupation with love, struggle to experience or believe in its authenticity.

Abstract

The article delves into the paradoxical nature of love as perceived by individuals with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It suggests that while both disorders revolve around an obsession with love, those with NPD are primarily concerned with self-love, often at the expense of others, while those with BPD are consumed by the fear of losing love. The author argues that the inability to love or be loved is a central tragedy for these individuals, and that the absence of the concept of love in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) represents a significant oversight in the field of mental health. The article draws a parallel between the Borderline's relationship with love and the addiction of a chronic addict, highlighting the belief that love, like a drug, is both necessary and harmful. Ultimately, the author posits that understanding these disorders can illuminate the essential role of love in mental health and human experience.

Opinions

The author believes that the DSM's omission of love as a factor in mental health diagnoses is a critical flaw, suggesting that a clinical approach focused solely on functionality is inadequate.
Narcissists are portrayed as individuals who do not acknowledge the inner realities of others, viewing them merely as a means to their own ends, which is seen as a defense mechanism to avoid empathy.
Borderlines are characterized by their deep-seated belief that love is inherently unsafe and unstable, leading to self-sabotage and a cycle of love and pain.
The article likens the Borderline's perception of love to an addict's relationship with their drug of choice, where the source of comfort is also the source of harm.
The author equates personality disorders with mythological curses, framing them as amatory curses that prevent individuals from fully engaging with love beyond their own ego.
The article suggests that recognizing the reality of love beyond oneself is crucial for a meaningful existence and that this recognition is impaired in individuals with NPD and BPD.

What Narcissists and Borderlines Teach us About Love

Am I holding tight or being carried away?

Of all the mental illnesses we have discovered or invented, Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorder are the two which truly demonstrate what happens to the human who does not believe in love. And yet, individuals suffering either disorder deeply obsess over love — the Borderline obsesses over losing love whereas the Narcissist obsesses over loving himself. Both types know love exists, yet they cannot experience its true nature. For them, love is, but in their own hearts, it does not happen.

The nightmare of the heart is to live in a world where one cannot love, or cannot be loved. We psychologists leave the soul to religion, which itself has destructuralized into spirituality, affording us some responsibility for mapping the world of the heart. Matters of the heart determine what we now call mental health but define in terms more sanitized and detached.

The great, shameful deficiency in mental health is that the word love does not appear in the DSM. Our entire basis for understanding mental illness diagnoses and their corresponding cures does not incorporate love. It is as if AI, in its heartless wisdom, were to measure the human psyche in terms of functionality instead of love.

To be a Narcissist, one must not believe in others’ inner realities. If the Narcissist were to weigh others’ happiness and misery the way he does his own, he would not be able to torment others shamelessly; to see others as the means with himself as the end; to be unrestricted by his lack of empathy.

To be a Borderline, one must not believe in one’s own ability to experience safe and lasting love. If the Borderline were to believe that love were stable, safe and real, she would not obsess over the very love she sabotaged; would not cast self-fulfilling prophecies on love’s failure; would not feel pain as something more real than love itself.

Narcissists fail to afford the same reality to others that they do to themselves. There are after all two kinds of people in the Narcissist’s world: the Narcissist, and everyone else. In the same way that extremists state, ‘If you aren’t one of us, you’re one of them,’ the Narcissist believes, ‘If you aren’t one of me, you’re just…them.’

We this in the first Avengers when the villain AI, Ultron, (who of course lacks empathy and carries a narcissistic name) states the terms of his ontological battle: ‘All of you against all of me!’

Whereas for the Narcissist others fail to exist, the Borderline feels that safety within love fails to exist so that, for the Borderline, love stops happening once it enters the Borderline’s heart. Love in a Borderline’s heart exists on borrowed time, which is the true curse of the Borderline: to feel love all the more intensely, and yet with a profound conviction in its mortality. While others may think that pain is temporary while love is everlasting, Borderlines believe love is mortal while it is pain that lives forever.

The only comparison I have seen with respect to the Borderline belief-system about love is that of chronic addicts I have treated: the way addicts both fear and love their habit; the way they believe it will liberate them from their pain before worsening it; the way they are a slave to it but can scarcely find their identity out of it. Borderlines narcoticize love into a drug, projecting onto their partners (or therapists, or friends, or relatives) the identity of the drug dealer who does not care about the Borderline, and instead wants the Borderline to need the very thing that will hurt her. This may explain Borderline splitting, in which the loved one is either a savior or a villain, which is just how addicts see their dealer.

You are Precious because I am not.

The nightmare of the Narcissist is that he cannot give love because others don’t mean anything in and of themselves. The nightmare of the Borderline is that she cannot receive love because love is unsafe or unstable, just like her. This is why these two disorders are fundamental to the mythology of the heart. They teach us what goes wrong, and in so doing, remind us of what needs to go right.

The ancient Greek gods gave somatic curses: blind the psychic (Tiresias); have the liver eaten (Prometheus); age eternally without dying (Tithonus). Personality disorders render amatory curses: the inability to give love because you don’t believe in others as worthy receptacles (Narcissists); the inability to receive love because you don’t believe you are a worthy receptacle (Borderlines). Either way, the individual does not believe in their love beyond themselves, and so lacks a reliable reality outside their ego.

If reality ends at our skin, the illusion that surrounds us fails to carry meaning. To live in a world of love, we have to recognize something is real beyond ourselves. We have to recognize that love is beyond ourselves, and that we are that love.