| Draft, partial, subject to revision |
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A connection between Borderline conditions and Shamanism should be explored. First I will sketch out the basics of Shamanic initiation, then discuss Borderline states.
Shamanic individuals are to some degree born, but also deliberately made. The goal of Shamanic initiation is clearly to open a channel between the egoic self of the aspirant and the Numinous or the nonegoic pole of awareness and anything that may lie beyond. This requires creating a permeability of the Self/Other boundary, the wall of repression which in the common individual serves the same purpose Jung ascribed to organized religion: to protect them from a direct experience of anything truly Other: the Numinous, the Adversary, God, etc.
The methodology of Shamanic initiation is as one would expect:
The Shaman is thereby allied with the Other, and provides the necessary channel between the Social Process and the Numinous, the Spirit World. The Shaman is thus both a sacred and a sacrificial being: sacred because of the association with the Numinous, and sacrificial because of the ensuing otherness and social isolation. Being tainted with the fearsome Other, the Shaman is respected and feared, but often not loved. Aloneness and celibacy are often the lot of the Shaman/Priest/Witch, who will often live somewhat apart from the tribe/town.
In the case of the Borderline condition, something has produced an opening to the Other, but without the support system of Shamanic initiation. The Shaman is expected to be weird and strange, but not wholly dysfunctional: thus the egoic self is supported by social approbation and by the preparation and affection of the Teacher who has already made the journey.
Anyone experiencing an unguided trip into the inner Twilight Zone, a spontaneous invasion of consciousness by Otherness, has no roadmap and no guide. Things become their opposite: the meaningful becomes empty, yet things develop strange new significance. The familiar world is effectively destroyed, which can be somewhat disconcerting.
A Psychologist friend of mine once allowed that "a few hits of acid are an excellent sanity test", and the individual is now indeed put to the acid test: annihilation, degeneration and madness are definitely options at this point, and retreat is not: innocence is lost, home no longer exists. There is no turning back.
Depending on the psychic constitution of the individual at the time of this unplanned midnight swim, things will break various different ways, which can be well-characterized by Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrices.
I am not at present at all clear about how or if BPM I or BPM IV relate to borderline conditions, and am at present inclined to think that they do not. See Rethinking BPMs for some discussion of this. Work is in progress, and discussions are ongoing. Comments are welcome.
Unfortunates characterised by BPM II will try to retreat, run away. I think they can become one classic sort of chronic borderline: ambulatory sucking chest wounds, who can at their worst be "Psychic Vampires" or "Black Holes". Dealing with such people is draining, difficult and dangerous, and perhaps should be avoided unless one is prepared to attempt a difficult therapeutic relationship. I am not suggesting they should be shunned, but one should relate to them only to the degree that one can do so without sustaining unacceptable damage. They are in a sense like drowning people; there is the danger of being pulled down with them. Conventional therapy with classic BPM II borderlines is notoriously slow or ineffective. According to the model I am experimenting with here, the goal of therapy should be not to 'normalise' a BPM II borderline, but to move them from their position of being frozen in horror in a BPM II-dominated state to the volcanism of BPM-III-dominated states, a much happier place to be.
Individuals characterised by BPM III will join the battle with vigor, and will try to fight and/or fuck the Gods and anything else they run into. As Ani DiFranco says in Out of Range on Buildings and Bridges:
We are made to bleed
and scab
and heal
and bleed again
and turn every scar into a joke.
We are made to fight
and fuck
and talk
and fight again
and sit around and laugh until we choke
sit around and laugh until we choke.
You will find them in the liminal, standing watch where life meets death. You will find them when push comes to shove, where the shit hits the fan. One expects that many an ER worker, combat journalist, professional soldier, extreme adventurer and so forth has a goodly touch of BPM III about them. If you are shot and pinned down in the field, if you are stuck in a strainer, undercut or terminal hydraulic, if you find yourself trapped in Deep Shit and Flaming Hell, pray to the Jolly Green God for dustoff: if you are saved, it will likely be one of these soldiers of Blood and Fire who left their post at the Gates of Hell to pull your ass out of the grass; certainly no one else is likely to be crazy enough to hang it all out there in the wind and go in after you. If you're lucky, they may even have a warm beer for you.
Such individuals may indeed be somewhat dysfunctional from certain perspectives. They will for example not be known for a stable lifestyle or especially durable personal relationships, particularly of the most intimate variety. Still, they will be people of dynamism: their inner rage and lust will give them no peace, but demand action and change: perhaps the only peace they will find will be when the outer world is sufficiently chaotic and energetic that it matches the maelstrom within. Unlike the Black Hole BPM II individuals, who may at best produce elegiac poetry or romantic novels (Proust, anyone?) when they are perhaps at or nearing the transition from BPM II to BPM III, the latter characters are more like White Holes, and might either kill you, fuck you or just burn you up in their blaze, but at least won't suck you dry while boring you to death. A classic example would seem to be Gilgamesh, who seemed to become more and more enraged, fighting everything, stealing every woman in his kingdom, until he found his friend Enkidu, and eventually went off to seek Immortality.