Here are two stories which illustrate narcissistic and borderline personality structures respectively. We’ll begin with the stories themselves, and how their similarity suggests a common developmental origin in childhood. Then we’ll look at how their divergence from one another shows up at the developmental threshold of symbol formation and finally how they differ with reference to feelings of guilt and shame.
The Two Old Friends.
There were once two old friends who lived on different sides of the mountain. One of the old friends was so hungry he decided to go out into the forest to see if he could find some nuts but all he found were oak apples. He thought he’d go down into the village and try to sell them anyway. Perhaps some idiot would buy them. Meantime, the other old friend was so hungry he had gone out in search of poppy seeds. He came home empty handed but filled up his sack with ashes, thinking to go and dupe some poor fool in the village below.
Half way there the two old friends bumped into each other. They clapped one another on the back and boasted a bit about how wonderful life was on their respective sides of the mountain. Finally, they came up with the brilliant idea that they would swop the sacks and save themselves a journey down into the village which, in any case, surely didn’t merit being graced by their presence. So each returned home chuckling about how they had outsmarted the other.
When the first old friend got home he opened up his sack of poppy seeds to discover nothing but ashes. He was furious and ran around the mountain armed with a rake to teach the other old friend a lesson. When the other old friend got home he opened his sack of nuts to find only oak apples. Enraged, he grabbed a hoe and rushed around the mountain to demand justice. When they met in the middle they beat one another black and blue before dissolving into laughter.
”I never could cheat you brother!’
‘No, and I never could cheat you….’
So they decided to go cheat someone else together, two heads being better than one, and hired themselves out to a rich man for a few days thinking that when they got paid they might see where he kept his money. Sure enough, when the time came, the rich man drew up some gold from his well and so that night the two old friends snuck into his garden to liberate the remainder.
One old friend lowered the other old friend down into the well where he filled up his sack with gold but not to the brim. He knew full well he would be left behind if he sent the gold up first so he left room for himself and climbed in after. Sure enough, once the gold was hoisted up, the old friend set off at speed, with no more thought for the other old friend until he popped his head out of the sack, thanking him for the ride. The old friend was so exhausted from all this effort of carrying both gold and man he set down to rest and soon fell asleep whereupon the other old friend shouldered the gold and slipped away.
When the old friend woke and found the gold missing he connived a cunning plan. He tied a thread to a stick and cracked it like a whip as though leading an ox and cart. He knew the other old friend was lazy and would wait for the prospect of a free ride. Sure enough, around the bend of the lane sat the other old friend with his thumb out. He was so tired from his exertions that he had fallen asleep with all the waiting. So the old friend now took back the gold and ran all the way home, telling his wife to hide it in her wooden chest and bury him in a shallow grave so that the other old friend would think him dead.
When the old friend arrived he was shocked to find the weeping wife, then suspicious, but also moved by the woman’s tears. Perhaps he was a bit upset himself now and so they wept together long and hard for the demise of the old friend. Then the old friend asked to see the other old friend’s grave to pay his respects. The clearly hasty arrangement of things aroused his suspicions once more and so he began to make sounds like an angry bull about the mound of earth until the other old friend cried out in fright and leapt up from his pit.
‘Don’t tread on me, my old friend will find me.!
‘I found you already old friend..’
The old friend shook the earth from his clothes and the other old friend dusted him down, meanwhile his wife dragged out the gold and divided it all evenly between them.
……………………………………………………
Snow White.
Our second story, Snow White, has a different kind of splitness and fragmentation.
A Queen dies giving birth to a princess, as white as snow, as red as blood and as black as ebony wood. The King soon married again, a proud and vain woman who hated Snow White and wanted her dead. The Queen had a magic mirror which she would consult, asking, ‘Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest of us all?’ And each time the mirror would reply. ‘Thou, oh Queen, are fairest of all.’ One day she asked and it spoke differently..
”The queen was fairest yesterday,
But Snow-White is fairest now.”
The furious Queen ordered a huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and kill her, bringing back her lungs and liver as a token. But the huntsman let her go out of pity. He returned with the lungs and liver of a boar he’d killed instead which the Queen promptly had Cook prepare with parsley and a light balsamic glaze. Once she had cleansed her pallet she again went to the magic mirror and was astounded to hear it tell her..
“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”
The Queen disguised herself as an old peddler and went to the dwarves cottage, crying: “Pretty things to sell, very cheap, very cheap.” Snow-White unbolted the door and let her in. “Child,” said the old woman, “what a fright you look; come, I will lace you properly for once.” But the old woman laced her so quickly and so tightly that Snow-White lost her breath and fell down as if dead. “Now I am the most beautiful,” cackled the Queen to herself, and ran away.
The seven dwarfs came home just in time to resuscitate her.
When the wicked witch went back to the mirror it answered as before…
“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”
So then she made a poisonous comb and went knocking once more. When Snow White let her in, she said: “Now I will comb you properly for once.” Hardly had she put the comb in her hair than the poison in it took effect, and the girl fell down senseless. The dwarfs again returned just in time to remove the comb and save her.
When the Queen got home she again consulted the mirror which answered as before;
“O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
Snow-White is still alive and well,
And none is so fair as she.”
When she heard this the wicked queen quivered with rage. “Snow-White shall die,” she cried, “even if it costs me my life!” Whereupon she went into a secret, lonely room and there she made a very poisonous apple. When it was ready she dressed herself like a peasant and called upon Snow White once more who hardly had more than a bite of it than she fell down dead. And when the Queen again asked of the looking-glass….
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who in this land is the fairest of all?”
it answered at last—
“Thou, O Queen, art the fairest of all.”
Then her envious heart had rest, in so far as an envious heart can have rest.
The grief stricken dwarfs made Snow White a transparent coffin of glass and they laid her in it. They wrote her name upon it in golden letters and took it in turns to watch over her. One day, a king’s son came into the forest and was amazed at the glass coffin with the beautiful Snow-White inside. He begged the dwarves to let him have her, so struck was he by her beauty and had it carried away by his servants on their shoulders. It then just so happened that one of them stumbled over the root of a tree and jolted the coffin. The shock dislodged the poisonous piece of apple caught in Snow White’s throat and before long she opened her eyes and was once more alive.
“Oh, heavens! where am I?” cried she. The King’s son, full of joy, replied, “You are with me.” And soon they came to be married with great show and splendour.
The Old Queen was invited to the wedding and when she arrived… they were waiting for her. Iron slippers had already been put upon a roaring fire. The red hot shoes were brought over with tongs, and set before her. Then she was made to put them on and dance until she dropped down dead.
Fairytales as psychological paradigms.
I bought these two stories as playful ways of thinking about Narcissistic and Borderline structures. In the story of the Old Friends we have all the rivalry, deception, manipulation and seduction of narcissism. In Snow White we have the denial, splitting and envious spoiling associated with a borderline adaptation.
Adhesive Anxiety.
You will be familiar with Bowlby’s attachment styles, though this may well hamper any efforts to think about which particular attachment styles might give rise to either narcissistic or borderline phenomena. We are happily saved from this dilemma by the work of Esther Bick who introduced the concept of adhesive attachment in the 1960s as part of her work on early infant development, particularly in her paper “The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations” (1968). She used the term adhesive identification or adhesive attachment to describe an earlier primitive mode of relating in which the infant relies on physical contact prior to any differentiation between self and other.’
Bick proposes that the skin is the infant’s earliest symbol and experience of containment. It is not only a biological boundary but a sensory modality of cohesion, safety, and “being held together.” which keeps the infant’s experience organised.
If the time and quality of being in arms dips below a certain threshold, the infant’s parts are left feeling as though they have no binding force amongst themselves. The infant must then develop a compensatory ‘second skin’, a defensive structure which forms when it experiences:
- unreliable holding
- emotional unavailability alternating with
- overstimulation
- inadequate or ‘over’ containment of distress.
Adhesive attachment is thus a response to a certain kind of maternal holding, grandiose and encapsulated in the face of intrusive absence, fragile and enmeshed in the face of envious spoiling. It is a response to the severing of what Jean Liedloff would call the ‘continuum concept’, the essential containment of skin to skin contact which ensures confidence, coherence and going on being.
These two different ways in which the continuum is interrupted evoke distinct compensatory patterns of idealisation which shape future development. The ‘too loose hold mother’ idealises the child to bridge the gap, but, as Schwarz-Salant reminds us, it comes in the form of, ‘you’re wonderful but I hate you for it,’ giving rise to later splits in the nascent ego. The ‘too tight hold mother’, idealises herself with ‘though you’re an encumbrance I can heroically bear with it,’ giving later rise to a dread of autonomy and the terror of envious attack.
How does this pertain to the story of the Two Old Friends?
The two old friends are poor. They have nothing but the clothes on their backs and no food to eat. Their compulsive cheating is born of deprivation. The backdrop of this story is one of maternal neglect and subsequent impoverishment of inner resources. The internalised mother as nourishing object is nowhere to be seen. Developmentally, she is insubstantial and cannot provide sufficient cohesion for the infant’s interior world, giving rise to an experience of self which Bruno Bettelheim describes as ‘the empty fortress’, characterised by self-aggrandisement and defensive fortifications.
The mountain between the old friends suggests separation, but they remain psychically glued in endless rivalry, in place of I and Thou, compulsively repeating the same patterns of betrayal, anger, and identification. Their fused, symbiotic arrangement means the old friends cannot genuinely relate to one another. They cannot establish a stable boundary between self and other. Fraudulent interactions are structured to serve and maintain the self’s omnipotent position rather than to promote mutuality.
Jung saw narcissism as an inflated, defensive ego which resists deeper self-awareness, hindering true psychological growth and individuation. The theft of the rich man’s gold captures this sense of arrogating the numinosity of the Self to partial ego states. Otto Kernberg emphasises the ‘use of others as instruments….. as tools for the maintenance of self‐esteem or the grandiose self, rather than as partners in a genuine relationship of mutuality.” (p. 123) Ledermann advances Kernberg’s thinking, ‘lack of love for oneself and concomitant feelings of aloofness arise as an early defence against the terror of not being able to be related to and of non-existing’. “I am afraid’, says Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘they might someday find out that there’s nothing inside me, that I am only the skin of someone, and that inside, under my arm, perhaps, there’s nothing but emptiness.”
The old friends’ beatings and quarrels do not break their bond, they reinforce it,
acting like the “positive reinforcing function of negative attention” (Gallimore, Tharp & Kemp. 1969) When skin to skin needs are unmet by nurture they must be set in place by other means. Aldous Huxley makes the brilliant observation in ‘Chrome Orange’ that the nascent Central American Republics went to war with one another after gaining independence from Spain (15th Sept 1821), in order to know themselves as nations. Indigenous culture had been eroded by colonisers who, now too, were no longer. This crisis of cultural identity and the need for internal cohesion was resolved by going to war with one another, each waving their flag, freshly filled with the glue of patriotic fervour and sticking together.
Adhesive Attachment in Snow White.
The Queen does not relate to Snow White as an autonomous other but as a thing to which she is glued in psychic obligation and by whom her ontological status has been relegated. Snow White’s autonomy is intolerable because it undermines the sense of enmeshment which maintains cohesion. Snow White’s ‘fairness’ doesn’t just offend the Queen, it collapses the pre-eminent self-structure which gives the Queen meaning. She has no alternative source of worth beyond the impulse to eclipse, no purpose beyond domination.
Alchemically, Snow White’s red, white and black nature point to her psychic wholeness which the Queen can neither attain nor tolerate. The Queen’s wish to eclipse and erase Snow White is a desperate effort to destroy anything which might upset the hegemony upon which her identity has come to depend.
The Queen’s adhesive wish to devour Snow White’s lungs and liver seem especially significant. In antiquity the liver was the seat of feeling, hence Prometheus’ poetic punishment of having his liver repeatedly eaten for daring to have compassion for humanity expressed by his theft of fire. The lungs serve pneuma, the spirit, and so the Queen’s destructive incorporation constitutes an attack on the emotional and spiritual vitality of the child, an enactment of her desire to internalise qualities lacking in herself.
Erasing and incorporating is how the wicked witch preserves her sense of self. I came across an example in the street the other day. A mother is striding along at great speed. Her three year old is running to keep up. She asks angrily, ‘Why are you running?’ He replies, ‘because I am not.’ To remain congruent with mother’s denial of reality, that he’s having to run to keep up with her, he has to deny it himself, even if this gobbles up his embodied experience.
Fordham’s “symbol formation.”
Now let’s think about the emerging differences between the stories as they approach the threshold of symbol formation. For Fordham the Self is a primary, innate totality which de-integrates and re-integrates through-out development. Symbol formation is the psychic activity by which these de-integrations and re-integrations are managed, linking inner and outer worlds.
‘My interior,’ says Jung in the Red Book, ‘gives birth to the children of chaos of the primordial mother. He who enters the crater also becomes chaotic matter, he melts. The formed in him dissolves and binds itself anew with the children of chaos.’ (p179)
Fordham’s ideas about de-integration and re-integration illustrate the psyche’s innate capacity for self-healing by describing a dynamic process through which the self continually disassembles and reorganises its structures in response to inner and outer experiences. Thus, symbol formation exercises the self’s developmental potential, its ability to transform raw experience into meaning and is predicated, to paraphrase Katerina Serafidou, on loss; a recognition that giving credence to the sovereignty of others is the price we pay for exercising our own.
Symbol Formation and the Two Old Friends.
The two old friends operate almost entirely on the level of the concrete and pre-symbolic. The exchange of sacks, nuts for oak apples, poppy seeds for ashes, is fraudulent, a distortion of symbolic exchange. That which purports to be nourishing is not. They cannot imagine meaning beyond the object itself. So they enact transactional trickery and theft in place of imaginative transformation. When my younger brother was about six or seven he took a ten pound note from my mother’s purse and encouraged his friend next door to do the same. They then swopped the notes so it wasn’t stealing any more. They were so sure of themselves that they proudly announced what they had done and were most upset when no one else thought them quite so clever.
Failure to Internalise the Other.
Symbol formation requires internalising a loving object but the two old friends have none and so can only exist through physical confrontation or fraudulent exchange. Their encounter has the effect of confirming isolation rather than alleviating it because every transaction is an exercise in deceit. They “know” themselves through either competitive rivalry or identifying with one another rather than via intersubjective recognition. Every affect (shame, anger, greed) must be acted out as hitting, swapping, or stealing.
Symbol formation requires a capacity for inner space, the ability to tolerate separation between ego and Self, subject and object. Narcissistic structures tend to collapse this space. Symptomatic lack of empathy is more deeply rooted in a failure to experience the other as sufficiently their own person to have feelings about them in the first place.
Death and rebirth.
Symbol formation finally occurs with the dusting down of the old friend following his interment, a gesture which acknowledges and validates the subjective needs of the other. This can occur once the cycle of trickery is broken by the old friend handing over the gold to his wife for safe keeping. It’s a crucial moment in the story because it introduces the possibility of a mediating third who both takes the gold in and gives it back in a differentiated (shareable) form. This can happen once the old friend has experienced the de-integration and re-integration of death and rebirth sufficiently to enable sharing.
The motif of burial as a metaphor for the crossing of developmental thresholds is to be found in the initiation rituals of many indigenous cultures. Symbolic burial represents a creative regression into the womb of the Earth. In ‘Symbols of Transformation’ Jung repeatedly develops the idea that regression is not merely pathological but a necessary precondition for further psychological development. Throughout the “Hymn of Creation” and “Sacrifice” chapters Jung argues that regression toward the mother-symbol is teleological, not merely infantile. In his essay, ‘On Psychic Energy’, in vol 8 he says, “From [this] standpoint the libido regresses to the imago of the mother in order to find there the memory associations by means of which further development can take place…” Jung is wanting to contrast regression which becomes transformative because it can be symbolised and regression which remains trapped in repetitive enactment because it is not.
Developmentally, both the wooden chest and the earthen grave suggest Winnicott’s concept of “maternal reverie”, the process by which a mother takes in the infant’s raw emotional experience, processes it internally, and returns it in a more manageable form. Her wooden chest and the earthen grave are ”holding environments,” psychological spaces within which the infant’s unintegrated anxieties can be contained and transformed through her empathic responsiveness. The old friends are mostly stuck in their repetition compulsion until a containing third gets involved and their closed circuit can become transformed into a developmental arc.
The final division of the gold is thus not merely a moral ending. It is the symbolic fruit of a regression that has finally become developmental rather than merely repetitive. The circular economy of narcissistic trickery gives way to a new psychic organisation centred on participation rather than possession.
Snow White and symbol formation.
It seems the brothers Grimm were struggling with their own capacity for symbol formation in the early editions of their work. In the first 1812 edition the wicked witch is Snow White’s own biological mother. By 1819, in the second edition, the birth mother dies and a step mother is given the status of wicked witch. This alteration seems to reflect society’s increasing tendency to idealise motherhood by displacing destructive maternal impulses onto third parties. The 1812 text is arguably the more psychologically striking version, because the “Terrible Mother” and the “Good Mother” are united in a single figure rather than being split between mother and stepmother. In the second edition the murderous maternal impulses are denied, split off and projected.
The Queen, as destructive maternal introject, harries the child’s emerging autonomy, enviously attacking her in order to split off psychic pain which cannot be consciously represented or symbolised. Such denial both negates and depersonalises in the same breath. It is helped to do so by what Meltzer and Segal call concrete equation thinking, the confusion of symbol and thing, or of being and behaviour. The Queen doesn’t just envy Snow White’s beauty; she equates it with life itself. To destroy Snow White is to do more than rid herself of a rival, it is to ensure ontological security rooted in the wish to dominate and control.
The Queen cannot distinguish being admired from being alive; or being eclipsed from being annihilated. Hence her terrifying conviction, if Snow White lives, I die. She must succeed in her quest to kill Snow White, ‘even if it cost me my life’ because there is no symbolic space to separate self from other. This is managed instead by the systemic shaming that splitting entails and that suffuses their interaction, ‘what a fright you look, I will lace you properly for once.’ Her need to diminish and extinguish seem to be fundamental to her own inner peace. She achieves this by getting the child to believe that she is doing her a favour. ‘Being helped’ and feeling guilty begin to blend in deadly poison to eros and autonomy. The problem is not too much defensive closure as with the two Old Friends, but too much psychic permeability and fragmentation.
Shame and Guilt.
We could say that the two old friends lack empathy but I wonder if this misses the mark somewhat. The failure of empathy feels symptomatic of something more fundamental; the realm of I and thou has yet to be inhabited. It’s not that cheating feels either wrong or justified, it’s simply that cheating failed to work. The two old friends are pre-moral rather than amoral. The concept of being-with is reduced to, ‘you’re with me or against me’. The choice is between identification or enmity. This is manifest initially as the shared projection of inferiority onto the villagers they separately hope to fool, then, upon one another and finally upon the rich man whom they seem to feel deserves being robbed.
There is no guilt about any of this. In every instance guilt is warded off and converted into the active shaming of third parties. There is as yet not enough differentiation out of what Masud Khan would call ‘symbiotic omnipotence’ to exercise the distinction between subject and object upon which basis self reflection and moral consideration might be possible. Being and behaviour are still fused. This makes a mine field of personal accountability. Any criticism levelled at behaviour feels like a shaming attack levelled at the core of being. Persona, confused with the Self, cannot distinguish guilt from shame and so it has to be projected.
In Snow White, guilt and shame are treated very differently. Our heroine seems to have little capacity to defend herself from the envious shaming of the wicked queen. She even seems to invite attack, allowing her into the temenos of the dwarves cottage despite being expressly warned not to. She buys into the shaming condemnation of the wicked witch in line with Ferenczi’s ‘identification with the aggressor’. Ferenczi describes the child as becoming almost automatically attuned to what the aggressor wants, attempting to anticipate and gratify those wishes, effectively abandoning her own subjectivity in order to survive the relationship.
The borderline structure will thus assume guilt and blame, as a form of appeasing judgmental or destructive objects and warding off catastrophic expectations. The emotional dysregulation involved often has much to do with overwhelming feelings of responsibility, a form of plea bargaining to prevent abandonment. When Snow White is about to be killed by the huntsman there is no sense of her protest only of an appeal for mercy. When the WW comes calling at the cottage she feels she has to let her in despite her own experience which the Queen’s shaming of her further undermines.
Both Snow White and the two old friends demonstrate a curious ambiguity to the prospect of shame. Both parties are mobilised against it whilst subtly colluding with it. Whilst shame infuriates the two old friends they would rather be shamed than held accountable. Whilst shame tends to collapse Snow White she would rather be shamed than be abandoned.
The tendency of these two adaptations to share internal organisation around shame and the prospect of abandonment or humiliation respectively makes their interaction with one another somewhat complicated. Though both fall into denial they tend to do so in somewhat opposing ways. These differing defensive structures can then fit together in a mutually reinforcing dynamic. The borderline tends to carry guilt and shame internally, disowning aggression, competence and self sufficiency with which the narcissistic structure happily identifies to shore up fragile esteem whilst projecting shame, vulnerability, and dependency which the borderline individual, whose identity is already organised around expectations of defectiveness and abandonment, is especially susceptible. Such mutual projection, could be called a complementary system of projective identification, each person’s defensive organisation temporarily stabilises the other’s in a psychological version of the nursery rhyme about Jack Spratt and his wife;
‘Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean, and so between the two of them, they licked the platter clean.’
Conclusion.
As useful as these stories are they do both seem incomplete. Even though the two old friends have learned to share there is still the sense that their theft of the gold remains unaddressed and that there is yet some reparation to be made with the rich man. The story seems to achieve further resolution in a later Grimm’s fairytale ‘The Stolen Farthings’, where a young ghost can only find peace and cease its haunting once the guilt of theft can be bought to light and deflating reparations made.
Similarly, whilst Snow White is liberated from the tyranny of the wicked queen her glass entombment has a different quality than the earthen grave of the old friend, suggesting preservation rather than transformation. Her situation is still unresolved insofar as she remains ideal which is perhaps why the further story of Snow White and Rose Red becomes necessary. In that story clearly differentiated sisters co-operate to deal with an ungrateful dwarf who seems to represent the unintegrated envious aspects of the wicked queen left hanging over from the previous fairytale. The sisters befriend a bear with whom they are able to play aggressively without destroying the relationship. It is the bear who ultimately deals with the dwarf though the girls create the relational conditions within which the dwarf’s power can be overcome. The feminine is no longer represented by a single idealised protagonist. It has become two legitimate forms of femininity. The dwarf, unlike the Queen, leaves behind a treasure, so some value is derived from the difficult encounter above and beyond the relief of a happy ending.
