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1. Text by Anna Komissarova

 

Borderline Society of Unlimited Possibilities

 

The age of neurotics has come to an end; the postmodern subject has evolved into a borderline state between sanity and madness. Captured by the illusion of omnipotence yet torn by inner contradictions, they drift from megalomania to depression, fragmenting into multiple identities and leaving their own desires unfulfilled. Involuntarily slipping into extremes, they turn independence into isolation, security into conservatism, and influence into terror.

According to generalized statistics, around 3.5% of the world’s population today suffers from borderline personality disorder. Depression, alongside schizophrenia, is considered one of the most widespread mental illnesses—over the past 15 years, the number of people with depression worldwide has nearly doubled and continues to grow.

 

History of the Term

 

The term 'borderline' was introduced in 1938 by American psychoanalyst Adolph Stern to describe patients who did not respond to standard psychoanalytic treatment. In his work Psychoanalytic Investigation and Treatment of the Borderline Group of Neuroses, published shortly before Sigmund Freud’s death, Stern vividly described the borderline state using the metaphor of 'mental bleeding', adding marked hypersensitivity, bodily tension, and a combination of depression with outbursts of rage. He believed that narcissistic disturbances lay at the root of the heightened reactions of borderline patients to the analyst’s remarks and to external reality in general.

In 1942, Helene Deutsch referred to such individuals as 'as-if personalities', pointing to their inner disintegration. Psychiatrists Paul Hoch and Philip Polatin in 1949 proposed a special type of 'pseudo neurotic schizophrenia'.

The most comprehensive theory of borderline conditions was formulated in 1975 by British psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg in Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. He shifted the focus from descriptive clinical criteria to structural ones—considering overall functioning and object relations. For Kernberg, a borderline psychic structure implied affective and behavioral instability at the boundary between neurotic and psychotic ranges, diffuse identity (an inability to integrate the self into a coherent whole), and reliance on primitive defenses without a total loss of reality testing.

A key theorist of the British object relations school, Margaret Mahler argued that the borderline structure forms through fixation at the third subphase of the separation–individuation process—the 'rapprochement' stage. During this period, the child repeatedly attempts to separate from the mother but also returns due to fear of losing her love. The child has not yet fully differentiated themselves from the mother as part of external reality, remaining in a symbiotic fusion and experiencing infantile omnipotence.

In the same year, French psychoanalyst Jean Bergeret published Depression and Borderline States, emphasizing depression as the primary symptom—arising from early object loss or disturbed relationships and a deficit in primary narcissism. In Bergeret’s view, the subject becomes overly dependent on changes in external reality.

 

The Narcissism of Small Differences

 

Beyond political and economic factors, certain (intercommunial) conflicts can be understood as a clash of closely related identities—what Sigmund Freud called the 'narcissism of small differences'. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud observed that neighboring communities with many similarities often engage in rivalry and mutual contempt.

French psychoanalyst René Diatkine elaborated on this concept, arguing that small differences—such as one’s native language, dialect, or cultural practices—symbolize primary narcissistic identification with the maternal figure. To reject or threaten these differences is perceived as an attack on one’s most fundamental sense of self.

In such contexts, the withdrawal or weakening of an external stabilizing presence can activate latent tensions between groups, triggering a regression to more primitive modes of identification. Under these conditions, extremism often emerges as a defense against archaic fears of annihilation, projection, and fragmentation.

Ethnic or sectarian violence, in this view, can be understood as rooted in pathological projective identification—an attempt to eliminate the other identity and usurp its place, driven by the unconscious terror of dissolving into sameness.

 

Borderline as a Symptom of Capitalism

 

At the turn of the millennium, the concept of borderline conditions became a lens for understanding the 'post-socialist' world after the Cold War, marked by the collapse of former social cohesion, norms, and values. The 2000 European Biennale of Contemporary Art Manifesta in Ljubljana was titled Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defense, aiming to overcome the bipolar division of Eastern and Western Europe.

In his essay for the biennale catalog, Slavoj Žižek described the borderline state as a modern form of hysteria—the libidinal constitution of late capitalist society. The 'pathological Narcissus', he argued, cannot experience the paradox of desire—the split between desire and lack. Even when confronted with an object of desire, the subject does not know what they truly want.

Žižek suggests that today we are no longer governed by a strict, prohibitive father figure but by an obscene one who commands enjoyment. In order to preserve desire, the subject must leave it unsatisfied, condemning themselves to impotence and frigidity.

Indeed, contemporary society demands that individuals not limit or sublimate their desires, but mobilize and realize them. One is expected to be driven, motivated, entrepreneurial, communicative, and multitasking. Human suffering is now framed less in terms of conflict and guilt, and more in terms of shame and deficiency—an inability to realize one’s personal project due to a lack of energy or initiative.

Notably, a new generation of antidepressants—SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors)— emerged in the 1970s and 1980s and became especially widespread in the 1990s. In this sense, Prozac can be seen not merely as a 'happiness pill', but as a 'pill of initiative'.

Since the 1970s, borderline conditions have been diagnosed more frequently, and in the 1980s they were officially recognized as a disorder in the DSM-III under the name Borderline Personality Disorder. Diagnostic criteria include instability in interpersonal relationships, identity disturbance, and a pervasive sense of emptiness.

Otto Kernberg emphasized the importance of distinguishing between borderline personality disorder and a broader borderline personality structure, which is socially conditioned—a response to the inadequacy of the Other. Uncertainty about the future, constant environmental change, and chronic lack of time force individuals to adapt by developing situational or transient identities not grounded in stable roles or relationships.

At the unconscious level, this confronts the subject with narcissistic insufficiency. For psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, the narcissistic crisis reflects a breakdown in the relationship between the self and the world. The modern Narcissus is thus a suffering subject in need of protection against social and symbolic collapse.

 

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