The Double Bind and Borderline Personality Disorder

"One of the enduring puzzles of borderline personality disorder (BPD) is its relentless contradiction. Patients desperately long for closeness yet recoil from it, fear abandonment while provoking it, and seek reassurance only to reject it once it is offered. To clinicians, these patterns can appear baffling, frustrating, or even manipulative. But what if these contradictions are not incidental features of the disorder at all? What if they are its organizing principle?"

"In work I have been developing with Jerold J. Kreisman, M.D., best known as the author of the classic book I Hate You, Don't Leave Me, we propose that BPD can be understood as a disorder of paradox, rooted in what communication theorists once called the double bind. This framework offers a unifying way to understand the origins, inner experience, and interpersonal chaos characteristic of the disorder, while bridging psychodynamic theory and contemporary psychiatric research."

Borderline personality disorder can be understood as a disorder of paradox rooted in the double bind. Patients experience persistent contradictory interpersonal demands: longing for closeness while recoiling, fearing abandonment while provoking it, and seeking reassurance only to reject it. A double bind arises when individuals receive mutually inconsistent messages at different communication levels with no escape or opportunity to comment, rendering any response wrong. Classic examples include a parent who verbally expresses love while conveying rejection and punishes the child for reacting. The double-bind framework accounts for origins, inner experience, and interpersonal chaos, and links psychodynamic and contemporary psychiatric perspectives.

Read at Psychology Today