Equal Light Equal Dark/The Tropic/The Borderline (intro)
Linguistic limitations on psychology part 3.0
Simsiyah gecenin koynundayım yapayalnız
Uzaklarda bir yerlerde güneşler doğuyor
Biliyorum
Dönence
—Barış Manço, “Dönence”, 1981
I’ve been thinking about trying to write a version of this essay for months and months. It’s been sloshing around my mind, occasionally crystalizing into something worth writing down, and then melting into slush again. I sit down to write, the thoughts melt out of my ears. I read a journal article, I get pissed off, I go for a walk, I stop thinking about thinking about the topic for a few days. Rinse, repeat.
Then a few things happened. The first is that I got introduced to a Turkish pop song from the 1980s (shoutout to Burak, my girlfriend’s Turkish coworker). It provided the scaffolding for my ideas to crystalize around. I built a playlist of songs on a similar theme, and it helped me decide what this essay is actually about.
The second is that two niche Canadian literary microcelebrities had a messy, semi-public falling out and subsequent muted mutual smear campaign (?). I don’t actually know how to characterize it—basically it seems like they just had a painful friend breakup that activated deep wounds and emotional patterning for each, and they’re both very online writers who are making it their readers’ business. Curiously, neither is naming the other, but they are both vagueposting and writing public essays about the conflict with plenty of identifying info and sloppy, embarrassing details: if you know who both of these people are and you have half a brain cell, you know they are talking about each other, and you know that they are out for blood, or at least they are in defensive character assassination mode. But it’s fine because neither is using the other’s name? Or something? The whole affair is catnip for my nosiest, most gossipy impulses; I’m watching each writer’s account with bated breath. Meanwhile the interpersonal psychoanalyst in me is stroking his beard. And it’s he who decided to use the showdown as something of a case study.
So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to theorize a bit about what some call the “borderline interpersonal process”. I’m going to outline a bit about the history of the borderline construct, drawing from psychoanalytic theorists and from science historians who have read those theorists more closely than I have. Then I’m going to do some close reading of a 1994 book called “Management of Countertransference with Borderline Patients” by Glen Gabbard and Sallye Wilkinson, which is a go-to book for therapists about how to deal with patients who seem borderline to them. Then I’m going to go “hmm” about all this, apply some of my musings to my own experiences as what I refer to as “The Bordeliner” and “The Borderlinee”, and use the weird niche literary drama as a container for The Borderliner and The Borderlinee. And then I might write even more on the subject, because that’s how I am sometimes. I anticipate having at least one separate installment for each of these topics. Strap in.
Before I get started, I want to make it very clear that I am just some girl with a blog. I don’t have any formal training in psychology, be it clinical, social, or otherwise. I don’t have any credentials that would allow me to diagnose borderline personality disorder, and in general I think that the haphazard deployment of the BPD label by the undercredentialed and the credentialed-but-unthoughtful is very very bad for individuals and for society. But what I do have is 15 years of experience thinking carefully about the borderline construct. I think anyone can take ideas seriously, even highly gatekept ideas. I don’t think lack of credentials or formal training precludes a person’s ability to think carefully and responsibly, and in fact I think that people often use credentials as a smoke screen to obscure thinking carelessly and irresponsibly. I want you, reader, to take my thinking seriously, but not to conflate it with medical advice. (You shouldn’t take medical advice from the internet anyway.)
Part 1 is now up!
Also, to whoever keeps anonymously sending psychology textbooks to my house, thank you, and who are you?
Cringe but true, this is the song that started all this. I love early 80s culture, Barış’s glamor, and the Turkish language.
IT BEGINS