Transcription
So from birth on, two independent and parallel segments of experience are constructed. One, a happy world in which a happy self relates to a happy other, and a different world in which an unhappy self relates to an unsatisfactory, or irritating, other.
And these early conditions gradually, naturally, get modified because you realize the ideal mother sometimes can be the frustrating mother, and my happy self sometimes is a horrible self. So it becomes modulated, and you integrate good and bad self into an integrated sense of yourself. And you integrate the representations of others into integrated, neither all good nor all bad, mixed, modulated others. And so you end up with an integrated sense of self and an integrated sense of significant others. That is normal identity, as I described it.
But if the predominance of bad experiences is so powerful and strong that this unification, this fusion, this combination cannot be achieved, then one is stuck with the separation of these two segments. An effort to keep them clearly separate to avoid that the persecutory experience contaminate the good one, that the world become a nightmare.
And then we have certain psychological, what we call, defensive mechanisms that separate all good experiences from all bad ones. We call that splitting or primitive dissociation. We split an ideal internal world from a persecutory one. We tend to project outside all bad things and try to control the bad ones so they don't attack it. So we have projection and splitting and omnipotent control, and we tend to deny that there's anything bad occurring in ourselves.
All these primitive defensive operations are part of what the, what we see in the behavior of, of borderline patients and severe personality disorders in general. And what happens in severe personality disorders is that they are stuck at a level of lack of integration of the self and lack of integration of the concept of significant others. In other words, at identity diffusion. What identity diffusion is at the bottom is a fixation at that earliest stage of development before integration takes place.