I Hate You--Don't Leave Me - Jerold J. Kreisman [39]
Like the world of the borderline, ours in many ways is a world of massive contradictions. We presume to believe in peace, yet our streets, movies, television, and sports are filled with aggression and violence. We are a nation virtually founded on the principle of “Help thy neighbor,” yet we have become one of the most politically conservative, self-absorbed, and materialistic societies in the history of humankind. Assertiveness and action are encouraged; reflection and introspection are equated with weakness and incompetency.
Contemporary social forces implore us to embrace a mythical polarity—black or white, right or wrong, good or bad—relying on our nostalgia for simpler times, for our own childhoods. The political system presents candidates who adopt polar stances: “I’m right, the other guy is wrong”; America is good; the Soviet Union is “the Evil Empire”; Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are the “Axis of Evil.” Religious factions exhort us to believe that theirs is the only route to salvation. The legal system, built on the premise that one is either guilty or not guilty with little or no room for gray areas, perpetuates the myth that life is intrinsically fair and justice can be attained—that is, when something bad does happen, it necessarily follows that it is someone else’s fault and that person should pay.
The flood of information and leisure alternatives makes it difficult to establish priorities in living. Ideally, we—as individuals and as a society—attempt to achieve a balance between nurturing the body and the mind, between work and leisure, between altruism and self-interest. But in an increasingly materialistic society it is a small step from assertiveness to aggressiveness, from individualism to alienation, from self-preservation to self-absorption.
The ever-growing reverence for technology has led to an obsessive pursuit of precision. Calculators replaced memorized multiplication tables and slide rules, and then were replaced by computers, which have become omnipresent in almost every aspect of our lives—our cars, our appliances, our cell phones—running whatever machine or device they are a part of. The microwave relieves adults from the chore of cooking. Velcro absolves children of learning how to tie shoelaces. Creativity and intellectual diligence are sacrificed to convenience and precision.
All these attempts to impose order and fairness on a naturally random and unfair universe endorse the borderline’s futile struggle to choose only black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. But the world is neither intrinsically fair nor exact; it is composed of subtleties that require less simplistic approaches. A healthy civilization can accept the uncomfortable ambiguities. Attempts to eradicate or ignore uncertainty tend only to encourage a borderline society.
We would be naive to believe that the cumulative effect of all this change—the excruciating pull of opposing forces—has had no effect on our psyches. In a sense, we all live in a kind of “borderland”—between the prosperous, healthy, high-technology America, on the one hand, and the underbelly of poverty, homelessness, drug abuse, and mental illness, on the other; between the dream of a sane, safe, secure world and the insane nightmare of nuclear holocaust.
The price tag of social change has come in the form of stress and stress-related physical disorders, such as heart attacks, strokes, and hypertension. We must now confront the possibility that mental illness has become part of the psychological price.
Dread of the Future
Over the past four decades, therapeutic settings have seen a basic change in defining psychopathology—from symptom neuroses to character disorders. As far back as 1975, psychiatrist