The opposites inside

Going back several decades, to my first years in graduate school, many of us beginning our career were in the habit of thinking of psychopathologies as variations on the normal. Not uncommonly psychotherapy trainees would refer to themselves or others as “that borderline… narcissist… obsessive… hysteric, etc” This way of thinking has an honorable history going at least as far back as Freud’s early work in the late 19th century, and probably much further. It is in this vein that I have often referred to core-styled/fuser/pursuer personalities as “borderline styled” and outer-styled/isolator/distancing personalities as “narcissistic styled.” The point here is two fold; that borderline and narcissistic pathologies are intensifications/extensions/elaborations of two normally occuring personality styles and that the normally occuring styles and the pathologies have important tendencies/dynamics in common. Psychotherapy lore has much to say about the characteristics of individuals who manifests these two styles.  In particular, I can confirm from my personal clinical experience in the long-term treatment of both individuals and couples, a very interesting finding sometimes spoken of by others; that inside every borderline styled individual is on unrealized narcissistic styled person, and inside every narcissistic styled person is a borderline styled person waiting to come out.       (to be continued)