About book I Hate You, Don't Leave Me: Understanding The Borderline Personality (1991)
I recently found out an acquaintance had been diagnosed as being bi-polar. I got this book at the library, and lo and behold found out that having a "borderline personality" is a similar but not same diagnosis as "bi-polar". They are similar conditions, but evidently bi-polar or manic-depressives have swings from one extreme to the other that follow cycles. Inbetween the opposite swings, they can be fairly stable. People with borderline personality condition (BPC) live constantly in a kind of fractured reality. This book was written in 1989, and contained some remarkably apt comments on why people become borderline.At the age of 18 months to 30 months, toddlers learn about object permanence. They learn that their mother can leave, and that she will come back. She exists even when the toddler cannot see her. Their terror when their mother leaves gradually moderates when they learn they have not been abandoned. These months are crucial in the emotional development of children, because if this window is missed or broken up, it causes damage that literally is impossible to repair. Borderline personalities are those children who because of whatever kind of physical or emotional trauma, never develop this kind of object permanence and relational stability. They never develop a healthy sense of "me" and "my mother" (or someone else), and as such remain in the pre-toddler emotional limbo of either being happy that someone is with you.... or distraught because that person has abandoned you and will never come back. From this fractured reality comes the title, "I hate you, Don't leave me". I found out alot of fascinating things about this very dreadful condition. And even more interesting ways to prevent it. Mother's and father's? Stay married and together. Divorce puts unthinkable pressure on young children that they do not have emotional maturity to handle. So the ways their little minds react is to become fractured so as to diffuse the emotional trauma. Divorce also opens up young children to abuse by non-family members who are brought into their lives -- boyfriends, step-dads and step-brothers and step-uncles who are more likely to abuse a child who is not theirs. Thinking about daycare? Don't do it.... children who are not cared for by loving caregivers (parents) risk attachment problems and a damaged ability to create and maintain healthy relationships for the rest of their lives. Now that is something worth asking about when people consider daycare!This is a very worthwhile book. It taught me a great deal about mental issues I knew little about. I leave with this quote, which sums up what someone with borderline personality condition lives with," A borderline suffers a kind of emotional hemophilia; he lacks the clotting mechanism needed to moderate his spurts of feeling. Stimulate a passion, and the borderline emotionally bleeds to death." (pg 8)
This book does nothing to convince me that the diagnosis of BPD is coherent or particularly useful. As always, case stories that neatly dovetail with the author's point of view are included, but I found the inclusion of gratuitous diagnosis of famous (and usually beautiful) women as BPD to be highly distasteful. Both Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana are dissected. I can see the appeal of fantasizing about offering therapy to such women, but working out those fantasies in book form is in questionable taste. Similarly, his tendency to blame progressive social structures for women's "confusion" about their identities is a marker more of his own politics than of causal factors for BPD, as is his frequent use of words like "harridan" and "harpy" to describe his female patients.His Freudian bent is made clearer by his reliance on Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism, a text in which Lasch expressed his belief that modern child-raising had interfered with the "natural" attachment of mother and child, necessary, in his mind, for a healthy culture. All case studies are cherry picked and presented in the light that the therapist chooses, and the presentation of this particular narrative is no different. Kriesman's (perhaps unconscious) racism is revealed in the story of "Annette," an African American woman whose BPD makes her "too sensitive" to perceived racist slights at her place of work. The solution is provided by the nice, white male Jewish co-worker who she so sadly misunderstood and ends, quite literally, with a round of "Kumbaya."
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This book was recommended to me as a way of understanding some of the actions and behaviours of someone in my very recent past. Unfortunately, I didn't find it much help in that regard. The book does go into a fair amount of detailed information about BPD, but I found it's focus on getting the BPD person in your life treatment, and what those treatment options are to be less useful to me.If you are in a situation right now, today, with someone with BPD who you think may actually be open to getting help and treatment then I think this book will be a great help. However, as a means to simply understand and try to deal with the realities of what loving a person with this illness means, it's rather thin. There is a section on communication, but I found it overly simplistic. While, again, it is not something I can do now, even thinking back to this particular situation in my life I could not imagine "Support, Empathy and Truth" working at all. So, not that helpful in the end, but that is more a result of the fact that my situation is not the one the book is intended to address.
—April
I Hate You Don't Leave Me by Kreisman and Straus is a good introduction to Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Not having read much in the line of psychology books, I also found it to be a helpful introduction to the discipline. My major complaint would be that the book itself is not exactly captivating, sometimes reading like a reference manual listing different medications or symptoms. Most points are belabored and repeated, probably as a means to aid memory.Regardless, it is a short and satisfactory introductory book which I am glad to have read. The material is universally valuable, and can help self-understanding even in those without BPD. Thus, while I would not by any means consider this an outstanding read, I would recommend it for the content. Some chapters are also worth re-visiting.Overall: 6.5/10
—Leon
Overall, the book gives a comprehensive breakdown of not only what borderline personality disorder is, but how it comes about and what can be done to treat it. In this respect, the book is a handy, informative guide for anyone interested in BPD. The book presented little that I didn't already know, but having read quite a bit about BPD, this is hardly a complaint. It covers the basics, which is all it sets out to do.The book's only failing, I feel, was with the "Borderline Society" chapter, and I don't think anyone would lose much by skipping this part. I lost a bit of respect for Kreisman in reading it, in fact. Kreisman unfortunately makes himself sound like a bitter, jaded old man harping the perennial "the new, morally corrupt generation is the ruin of us all" that older generations have been wailing for millennia. Are there certain aspects of society today that contribute to the development of a borderline personality? Sure, there's higher rate of divorce, less prescribed societal roles, less interaction with extended family... but then, what society in any age doesn't have its ills? The chapter unravels into a doom's day diatribe about the evils of social media and technology, which I think is more reflective of Kreisman's personal gripes about technology (which he is entitled to) than to any actual substantial threat of "borderline"-izaton of society.
—Rebecca
