What Causes Identity Diffusion in BPD & NPD? | OTTO KERNBERG

Primitive defense mechanisms such as splitting and projection are part of the behavior patterns of BPD and other severe personality disorders. But where do they come from?

Otto Kernberg describes the internal creation of good and bad segments in a person's early life, which are then, in a "normal" person, integrated into a sense of self and others that includes both good and bad elements. But what happens when the bad segment is too powerful and the integration cannot happen?

Otto Kernberg, a pioneer in the field of severe personality disorders and Borderline in particular (and creator of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy), discusses Borderline Personality Disorder from the viewpoint of clinician / ridiculously experienced expert.

[asdfzzxcv]

Really pleased to see Kernberg and other psychoanalysts doing short, condensed web presentations. Anyone trying to understand child development must appreciate how splitting works, and that it is a regular phase in childhood development that is superseded as the child becomes capable of tolerating mixed feelings towards their loved ones. As is clear, that acceptance of ambivalence doesn't always happen by any means, and we *all* retain a capacity for regressing back to these relatively primitive and simplistic ways of relating to ourselves and others. *All Of Us.* Kernberg's writings, such as Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis, can be dry, but the case vignettes are always good and you're provided with a way of thinking about different personality organizations that you just can't find in writings outside of psychoanalysis.

[Peanuts]

I think this is what happened to me, traumatic past made me splitting, with many difference personalities, some of them formed as personality, that comes from defense mechanism alone....

Splittings, dissociation, and severe nightmares around my trauma, yet im still depressed, oversleep and daydreaming to escape my reality....

[erich]

I'm finally at the point where I'm cognitively integrating but it's frustrating how far my emotional brain is lagging behind.

[KonjikiKonjiki]

I am tremendously glad for the opportunity to hear Dr. Otto's summaries like this.

[zaratrusta]

I really love how it seems like he said "a hippie world in which a hippie self relates to a hippie other" - it both reminded me of an ex-girlfriend through whom I discovered about NPD the hard way, and her own hippie past. Which all, come to think of it, makes me think about the whole hippie movement as a narcissistic reaction/defense against an unhappy/borderline disintegrated/fragmented world.

[educocult]

This is an amazing statement. Thank you for making this available. It is very powerful

[accordionSWE]

When I was a child I spent a couple of days every summer at my grandfathers house. My mother and my grandfather had quite a rocky start and they did not talk to each other for twenty years until they reconnected during the 1970s and 1980s. As a child I had no idea about this relationship history, I can only remember positive experiences, but the past years I have been discussing my issues with my mother and tried to understand the dysfunctionality in our family system over generations. What I wonder, in connection to Kernbergs reasoning, is how dysfunctional families use of strategies to "protect" the children from the truths in the dysfunctional family distorts the integration? There was nothing to complain about as a child but the narrative during my childhood was not really true.

[theretiredclinician]

Project all bad things, projective identification, primitive denial. Magical thinking.

[whitelotus_zero]

Informative + great production quality

[Katiejaa]

I thought I just experienced a break through in my consciousness... As if I just arrived in the world of plurality. It wasn’t until today that I really understood what it means to have an anchor, or direction for that matter. It was so vague... I did experience the inability to integrate but I thought it was because the load of my polarity wasn’t big/high enough. I thought that my ego identity finally understood it sense of power... Or is that just false hope of a borderliner?

Its as if I have so many choices but I never saw or chose them... I stayed powerless... and its as if I did things but without anchor, without meaning, just an ego doing things... No goals. Nothing. Just instant shit. What is this? No coherence, no harmony. Nothing. Just battles. No choices. Nothing. The fact that I see this means I’m not stuck right?

[JeffreyNColeman]

It's interesting that people with highly individual personal histories, who do not share the specifics of that "predominance of bad experiences, " nevertheless develop identifiable patterns of defensive mechanisms they share with many others.

[jamesmullaney]

I'm a lifelong sexual masochist, 58 years old, and in 2013 I went to went to the Payne Whitney Center at Weil Cornell-New York Presbyterian seeking treatment. I had an intake interview but they declined to treat me. They said it was because they didn't accept my insurance, a Medicaid HMO. So what does that say about this field of human enterprise?

[briansalzano]

I love this channel; the material here is legit.

[hexcoder]

I thought he was saying "hippy" instead of "happy" initially, lol.

[meggallucci]

I have struggled to understand narcissism for months, but Dr. Kernberg has summed it up nicely. Maybe a bit simplified, per him, but borderline personality structure with an added defense mechanism.

[kreese]

Brilliant, thorough, clear, helpful

[lorenzrosenthal]

Wow!
After a relationship with a BP, the same problem arose in me: I cannot integrate all these intense feelings I had during the relationship. It is like an inner enigma, a riddle I need to solve in order to progress. It questions ALL my relationships to any human in my entire life. How can such strong emotions exist and we walked through paradise and hell together, split up so many times and got back together and now there is no relationship anymore although we want each other?
It is unsolvable for me.

[Desmondbrown]

What happens when the outside world is just as bad as you think it is? When you have healed and you have integrated yourselves? And you stop focussing on the negative, but then you find out that the world is narcissistic and filled with evil people doing evil things, it’s not paranoia anymore because it’s actually happening to everybody right now?

[seidenschnabelfederflugel]

I have a huge identity crisis or diffiusion all the time. To this point that i sometimes feel i'm not existing anymore. I cant find a mirror to see myself in. A person usually needs to mirror me so that i can feel a sense of self. But i live very isolated and no one is there to be a mirror for me. So than i loose all sense of identity and this is really scary. And than i dissociate. I cant find myself anymore. And i cant find my identity anymore. Super scary and weird feeling. I really dont know what to do about that.

[sorenmickelsen]

This is me . . . and this is hard. #survivor