Bollas, C. (1996). Borderline Desire. Int. Forum Psychoanal., 5:5-9.

(1996). International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 5:5-9

Borderline Desire1
Christopher Bollas, Ph.D.

The borderline personality unconsciously seeks emotional turbulence because this complex of affect is the shape
of the object of desire. Whether these people were intrinsically disturbed as infants, or, whether the early object
world was itself disturbing, they knew the maternal object as disruptive effect. This effect then became the shape
of the object, so, in seeking turbulence they are in fact constituting the primary object. As painful and disturbing
an event as this is, it is nonetheless desired and finding themselves in states of distress is unconsciously
gratifying.

This person cultivates “borderline objects” which evoke turbulent frames of mind. Such an object usually has an
escalatory potential to it, so that the borderline may turn to ordinary distressing facts of life—environmental
pollution, harassment of workers in the work place—and transform these facts into self stimulating objects. They
bring about a toxic response which constitutes the object of desire.

The borderline personality often seeks moments of misunderstanding with the psychoanalyst paradoxically
enough in order to feel closer to the clinician. If he feels that he is bringing about irritation or distress in the
analyst, the patient feels that he and the analyst are sharing the primary experience together.

By persistently interpreting to the patient the unconscious desire of his character the analyst can effectively
deconstruct the analysand's pathological attachment and help the patient to understand a complex dynamic that
has always put this person at acute odds with himself, let alone with others.

Some years ago, well into the analysis of a borderline patient, it seemed that her frequent emotional
storms—occasions of profound fragmentation—was a curious object of desire. When emotionally upset by
something recollected from her life or something I said or did not say, did or did not do, her feelings rocketed
into that enraged “homing” intensity that clinicians working with the borderline patient know only too well;
except that with this patient, it was also clear—because fortunately she was unusually self aware—that once the
experience arrived it was feverishly embraced. What does this mean and what can it tell us about some if not all
borderline analysands?
Customarily we give the objects of the internal world a figurative character. A good object, a bad object, a
bizarre object call to mind a specular other, in one form or another. What if the primary object, however, is not
so figured? Not any object, because of course all persons form internal objects. But what if the primary object—
the paradigmatic object of objects formed within the first year of life—is experienced not only as disruptive but
as disruption and is therefore represented as emotional turmoil? What if the essential status of this primary object
is less in its specular character than it is in the emotional turmoil occurring within the self upon thinking it?2,3
An affect resides where otherwise the matrix of an “ordinary” object, the “material” of representation,
would begin to live. Feelings are the object. Hence, borderline collapses into ego fragments creates a sadly ironic
relation: although dreaded—it is simultaneously the primary object; inevitably therefore, desired.
—————————————

1 This paper was presented at the 39th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, San Francisco, USA, July
30th-August 4th, 1995.
2 As a frame of mind becomes the object it would otherwise represent in its own right, we may see how what Andre

Green (1) terms “the negative” applies in a very particular way to the borderline, who maintains attachment to the object
through primarily negative affects. Indeed, many of the issues raised in this essay bear affinities to Green's exceedingly
important work, Le Travail du Negatif, especially his examination of the borderline personalities passion for the negative.
3 The borderline primary object would be held in this patient as something known but not yet thought, what in an earlier work

I termed the “unthought known” (2)and which was explored in terms of the borderline patient in the essay “loving hate”.
-5-
 One day my patient flew into a deeply disorganising fury when she felt I made an insensitive comment. In
addition to plunging her from respite through idealisation of myself into belief that I was now useless and
untrustworthy, in addition to creating intense pain over the loss of me, in addition to causing her to fear that she
had mangled me and was now infested by my revenge, in addition to many other threads which were woven into
this emotional state her turbulence also seemed blissful. It was as if she found an other who had been missing for
a while, someone who she knew very well, someone who received her evacuative shitting and vomiting as she
flew into it, a forceful movement “into” an object gained by a devolution of herself into invading furies.
“You have seized my comment with an intense pleasure, as if I have given you opportunity to be stirred up
yet again” I said, Even though she pursued her object—now in the form of fragmented elemental turbulence—
she felt closest to me when I became the occasion of such anguish. Later in the session: “I think this turbulence
is a most familiar place, as if you are hugging something you cannot bear, but cannot bear to lose”. Another day:
“I think this is a kind of mamma whom you do not want to leave, a mamma feeling that allows you to empty
yourself into her, and for her to empty herself into you.” many times subsequently: “You are enraged with me
now—I have upset you—and become the disturbing spirit, who, now it has at last arrived, you do not want to
leave you.” Other times: “By upsetting you as I have, I think you feel I have offered you this shit-fitting mamma,
and you are confused because you both want this and abhor it at the same time.”
Work with borderline patients suggests the following hypothesis. Whether inherently disturbed as infants or
disrupted by the environment, or both, the primary object is less an introjectable possibility (not a specular
phenomenon available for progressive revisionary development) than a recurring effect within the self. Like the
wind through the trees, it is a movement through the self. As any emotion hints at the presence of this object, the
borderline is always tempted to find this object by escalating an ordinary feeling into a powerful moving
experience.
Such turbulence is not simply an affect. Characteristic of this state of mind is violent mental intensity—a
thinking and thinking and thinking again about x—often followed by fruitless talking about x that ultimately
floods the mind with excessive mental content on the one hand and overwhelms a listening other with too much
discourse on the other. The object becomes a “widening gyre” of thought that defies a center to hold it. Neither
thinking or speaking in this manner is a relief—as it might be with another sort of person—but quite the
opposite: it further aggravates the pain that has been the occasion of the response in the first place. Put in a
familiar vernacular, these people are “into” mind fucking: either molesting their own psychic life with
overwhelmingly disturbed thoughts or fucking with the other's mind by endless anguished talking. They create
this forceful primary object within the other as they unconsciously believe it establishes true intimacy. The non
borderline other feels invaded and may take “evasive action”. The borderline other feels that however disturbing
the relation, it is nonetheless the source of deepest truth and beauty. But finally even the borderline—suffering
from too much or being too much—must retreat into self isolation for recovery before inevitably returning to the
object of desire4.
The limited focus of this paper is to indicate how this turbulence is an object, one that arises out of an
intense emotional moment, but which grows into a more complex form, as it becomes a type of thinking and a
type of speaking, providing an inner shape constituted by a configuration of affect, thought, and speech.
Even though this turbulence exists in the place of the primary object, the borderline forms tertiary objects
constructed to exist “outside” the dominating realm of the primary object. Such objects bear the character of
false self work, constructions brought together in a fragile and deliberate way—and are felt to be an avoidance of
an essential truth. They screen the self from otherwise oppressed self states regarding as too endangering to be
liberated. One may think of Dante, deeply stricken by Beatrice (4). He stares at her across a room transfixed and
tormented and momentarily fears that others have seen his love object, but they have instead seen another
woman “in direct line” with his vision. “At once”, he writes “I thought of making this good lady a screen for the
truth” (4:7) which calls to mind the way borderline people
—————————————

4 See Steiner, Psychic Retreats (3).

-6-

create screen objects, stand-ins for the sequestered objects of desire: enough to get many of these people through
a childhood.
But this primary other is disturbance “itself” and Dante comes very close to saying that emotion is the thing.
“It … could be puzzled at my speaking of Love as if it were a thing in itself, as if it were not only an intellectual
substance but also a bodily substance. This in reality is false, for Love does not exist in itself as a substance, but
rather it is an accident in substance” (4:53). An accident in substance. Think of how borderline persons fall into
fragmentations. They seem psychically accident prone, thrown into torment by the apparent insensitivities of the
other. What if the primary object for this person, however, operates accidentally? What if for whatever reasons,
the infant or child experienced the mother as disruptive movement, eventually knowable as a negative
transformation of the self? An accident in substance? If so, then the object of attachment is the deeply disturbed
emotional wake of the other which includes the fright, rage and destructive hate aroused within the borderline
self, a persecutory anguish that further binds the self and its effective object in a psychically indistinguishable
combat of negative forces.
Like Ahab following the wake of his tormentor—Moby Dick—the borderline unconsciously follows the
object that stirs the self. (5) “Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; thats tingling enough for mortal
man!” he says to his crew a few hours before his death. In the same passage he thinks next of the wind: how it
can be a “vile wind” that blows “through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals and ventilated them,
and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces” (5:460). There is says Ahab, “something so
unchangeable” and strong about the wind that has blown him around the seas of the world. “Would now the
wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless,
but only bodiless as objects, not as agents” (5:461). The object as agent has a particular kind of body—that
different sort of thing in itself of which Dante wrote—a primary object that we know as its effect.
That “tingling” of which Ahab spoke, or the love racked states of Dante and other poets who wrote of their
loves as afflictions, is the psycho-sensational trace of a particular object of desire. The self roused by the other,
perceiving it sensorially, brought into the transference by instilling in the analyst's countertransference a
sensationally rousing storm of feelings that bind the self and other in a con-fusion. Not a confusion of thought as
such, but a merging through affliction, both participants in respiratory relatedness, linked by racing hearts,
adrenal highs. This desire is not from the instinctual core of the self, working its way to the wish proper; it is
emotion evoked by disturbing impact. Once roused, the fury of the self's persecutory force assumes a life of its
own, becoming a body shaped and sustained by fury.
Borderline persons sustain the other within by marrying partners who continuously rouse them, or by
preserving a “borderline object”—i.e. the thought of that partner or often an arousing cause such as victim rights
or the environment—which allows them to conjure self-afflicting turbulance at any time, one that has an
escalatory function: starting from a single “infraction”—in a case of harassment or toxic spillage—to the furious
widening gyre of the psychic apocalypse that surrounds the issue. The borderline object functions as an
emotionally impacting stimulus, that upon evocation arouses the sensorium. The fact that the borderline object is
most often on the border of the external and the internal—linked to an external happening, yet immediately
evocative internally—testifies to the unconscious place of the borderline's primary object: an outside that is
simultaneously an inside. The self is on the border of a simultaneity of valorisations: the object that impacts the
ego and causes it alarm; the object that is formed by the precise character of the subject's internal life at the
moment.
Borderline personalities will often try to share a borderline object with others, a form of breaking bread in
the communion of turbulence. They have an uncanny knack of bringing up in conversation topics that are
designed to evoke maximum emotional impact in the other, often unconsciously playing on the other's situational
vulnerability. In doing so, this object of conversation brings self and other into a brief encapsulated merger
through shared anguish, although the non borderline personality will usually rebuff efforts to turn personal
distress into a festival of anguish.
Recognition of his desire enables this patient to consider resistance to psychic change. To work
-7-

this through is to progressively abandon relation to the primary object, which occasions a very particular type of
anguish. Outbursts could often be seen as defiant resurrections of an attachment to the primary object: the affect
as thing.5 That kind of truth that is disaster, one which devolves ordinary life into madness, is tempting indeed to
the borderline. The catastrophic feels enlivening: a strange irony indeed. But if we see the absence of catastrophe
as the empty space following the other's vanishing—and one need only read Moby Dick to see Ahab's profound
loneliness and emptiness as he searches the empty seas for his tormentor—then it is possible to see how the
borderline perceives non catastrophic ways of knowing as self destructive.
If turmoil is the presence of the object, then the borderline person's absence of turmoil is also an affective
representation of the same primary object.
Indeed, psychic emptiness is part of the other's residence within the self, an inevitable outcome of the
moving effect of this object upon the self: stirred up and then abandoned. Full of enranged anguish and
then empty. Fullness and emptiness: self states that express contact with this object.
Renewed emotional turbulence, when the primary object reappears is strangely nourishing. Feeding off his
or her emotional tempests—it is, after all, what this other provides—searching for catastrophe from which one
takes succour is by no means unknown to us; the world's literature and art illustrates many examples of the self
feeding off rage, feeding off jealousy, feeding off loss. These feeds are compensatory nourishments as the
borderline turns the object-as-agent into a feeding occasion in order to transform a traumatic relation into
something of a nurturing one. The analyst's good enough technique is sometimes experienced as strangely
depriving as it seems to prevent such feeds and misunderstanding may be sought in order to gorge the self on
disturbed states of mind.
A “vertiginous self”, always on the brink of catastrophe, the borderline patient awaits catastrophic moments
to “milk” them when they arrive. Turmoil is the primary object beckoning them to plunge into the depths and it
is hard to resist the temptation. “I know I like to live on the edge” one patient told me, referring to a kind of low
level thrill, never knowing whether he would fall into the maelstrom of intense conflict or pull himself back to
safety. The edge or the border. A line which this personality known only too well, a feelable border which he
traverses, balancing himself, coming continuously close to falling, yet often able to bring himself back.
Borderline personalities often seek work with catastrophe services, such as counselling people in
earthquakes or natural disasters, serving as volunteers in victim support services. They have an uncanny knack of
knowing that such victims are disturbed by the object as agent, by something impersonal yet familial, something
that touches the core of a self and lives in malignant residence. They know what it feels like to believe that one's
life is now irreversibly defined by a shocking event but their unconscious addiction to that shock, their search to
revive it in order to gain excitement from it—to be close to what is believed to be the ultimate knowing truth—
disables them from weaning any other true victim from a life catastrophe. We know only too well the
unconsciously devoted victim: the man who never recovers from an automobile accident, the woman who never
recovers from a rape, the man who cannot talk about anything other than an earthquake he was in. The cathexis
of the object is barely hidden: an object the memory of which stimulates the sensorium and gathers the person
into this truth.
Borderline sensationalism binds the self as the ego fragments. It is as if the self failed by an apparent object
attacks it violently in mind and comes to pieces in the process; yet paradoxically, coheres the self by shit fits:
mental torment is both the other disrupting the self and the self's grasp on a reality. In their most extreme
states—usually in hospital—borderline patients will actually spit shit, and urinate in states of rage, which
amongst other things—and of course this is always overdetermined—constitutes attempted recovery through
libido: a libido turned to the body, contributing to a psycho-sensorial-sensationalism supporting the body ego.
One is reminded in these moments of the excretory territorialism of the psychotic who uses body excretions to
mark himself, his living space, and his valued objects. More typically, however, the borderline is covered in
mental pain and range, using affect for its sensational effect, rather than its communicative
—————————————

5 Kristeva (6) argues that the depressive's affect is the evocation less of an object, than of the thing, a conjuring of the real.
-8-

function. There is an autistic-somatic function to such use.

It is unfortunate that many of the well intentioned therapeutic endeavours designed to get the borderline
patient to understand and use boundaries, to find socially appropriate expressions, and to adapt to their
surroundings often support this person's false self. Here the false self is a move to be without affect, to avoid
engagements that still stir the self. The patient may be unusually “contractual”, trying to settle conflicts by
redefining agreements and gaining assurances. When I arrived two minutes late for one person's session, he spent
that hour and the next two enumerating agreements between us for what was proper under such a circumstance,
trying to get me to sign a contract, so, that if I did it again, I would be bound to receive a just retribution from
him. This false self, however, is constructed against any feeling. As feelings are unconsciously exciting, rousing
a hunger, the borderline feels himself sliding into a relation defined by intense turmoil. So when the analyst
makes a mistake the patient does not know what to do. Has the analyst momentarily offered them succour from
the primary object…”i.e. Hungry for something? Do you wish to feed off this?”—and the borderline is tempted.
But he will often try to rope in a false self and come to a contract to stem the slide.
Psychoanalytic writers from numerous schools of thought have quite rightly emphasised the nature of the
borderline's developmental deficiencies. In focusing on borderline desire, I wish to concentrate on a particular
clinical problem for the analyst. If we see the patient's desire for turbulence not simply as a decompensation
occasioned by internal objects falling from structural place or triggered by blows in reality, but as a conjuring of
the primary—the self feeding on its own anxiety and hate—we may see why he pursues the very disturbance
with abandon. When the patient understands that he takes a form of pleasure in communing with this object,
much of the seemingly senseless chaos of borderline attributes makes dynamic sense. “I know what you mean”
said one patient “I have always gotton off on it [turmoil], like some kinda sexual thing.”
 However painful it is to the borderline to discover through analytical interpretation that his coercive
emotionality and clinging grievousness is the realisation of a wish for a state of mind that is the object of desire,
it eventually enables him to see the unconscious gratifications sustained through his character, ones which when
lessened allows the redistribution of pleasure along different lines.
Until then, borderline desire seeks what the patient experiences as his deepest truth. Behind the ostensibly
offending other (whether analyst or someone else) is the intangible ghost of a profound familiar “other” who
inhabits the self and becomes indistinguishable from it., This desire does not have to seek the object, it knows
that this intangible force will visit the self regularly enough—in life events or in memory—and when it feels
itself being called to this communion, believes it is moving toward some awful truth that is at the very essence of
the formation of the self. The borderline's desire is to meet his truth and to be moved by it.

References
1 Green A. Le travail du negatif. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1993.
2 Bollas C. The shadow of the object: psychoanalysis of the unthought known. London: Free Association Books,
1987.
3 Steiner J. Psychic retreats. Pathological organizations in psychotic, neurotic and borderline patients. London:
Routledge, 1993.
4 Dante Alighieri. La Vita Nuova (1292-4). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.
5 Melville H. Moby Dick (1851). New York: W W Norton, 1967.
6 Kristeva J. Black Sun (1987). New York: Colombia University Press, 1989.
-9-

Article Citation
Bollas, C. (1996). Borderline Desire1. Int. Forum Psychoanal., 5:5-9