The specifics of discourse, mentalization and conceptualization of reality in the formation of a borderline personality

Shapoval Irina ORCID: 0000-0003-4285-2810 Doctor of Pedagogy Professor, Voronezh State Pedagogical University 394043, Russia, Voronezhskaya oblast', g. Voronezh, ul. Lenina, 86 irinashapoval@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction. Negative and unstable emotionality, alienation, antagonism, antisociality, irresponsibility, manipulativeness characterize certain social categories of contemporaries and act as clinical signs of a pathological personality in ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases, 2019) and DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, USA, 2013). Complementing these features are anhedonia, suspicion, lack of empathy, perfectionism, "social diseases", risk behavior, etc. define borderline personality organization (hereinafter – PLO) and disorder (hereinafter – PLR) as a model of pathological intra- and interpersonal relationships.

The personological aspects of discourse are ambiguous: it functions both as a personal construct and as strategies and tactics of human communication, including with oneself. Thanks to the structures of discourse and thinking, a person "tests" and controls reality (cognitively "masters" it), intuitively "grasps" meaning, engages in empathy, mediates his defensive strategies. In the analysis of the discourse, "linguistic personalities" are differentiated by temperament (active – passive), the content of social orientation (creator, consumer, destroyer), the needs in certain forms of relationships: people-oriented, against and from people or positions above/ below them ^{[1; 2]}. An important circumstance is the ability of too deeply incorporated discourse to "speak" by the subject (M. Foucault, T. van Dyck).

The subject of our research is the mutual influence of discourse deformations and cognitive mechanisms of mentalization and conceptualization of reality and self in a borderline personality. Her characteristic confusion of identity, misunderstanding of the inadequacy of her perception of reality and reactions to it, and the primitivism of psychological defenses of A. Langle ^[3] explains the violation of the information processing processes of his and others' experiences.

We believe that in the development and structuring of the subject's PLO, the decisive role belongs to the deficits and defects of mental representations and the conceptual sphere, which appear and are implemented in discourse as a personal construct and as strategies and tactics of human communication. Due to the specifics of mental representations and concepts in the field of social assessments, the borderline personality turns out to be counter- or asocial, and from the point of view of morality in many ways immoral.

The aim of the work is to analyze the conditions for the appearance and realization of deficits and defects of the "theory of mind" of the subject in his discourse and to prove their decisive role in the development and structuring of the borderline personal organization.

The content of the problem under study naturally orients the methodology of our research to the interaction and coordination of theories and ideas of phenomenology, cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, psychotherapy, discourse analysis. Interdisciplinary categorical-genetic analysis and synthesis of theories and ideas proposed by these sciences is the main method of research.

We proceed from the understanding of the destructiveness and rigidity of human cognition as the immanent basis of his personal and emotional disorders (oriented to "common sense", cognitive restructuring, "insight-oriented", semantic approaches of psychotherapy). Irrational cognitions, false interpretations of internal and external reality, non-delusional paranoid and quasi-psychotic experiences typical for people with PLR, unusual perception and thinking ^{[4; 5; 6, etc.]} directly correlate with destructive behavior.

Relying on the general patterns of cultural and historical development of the psyche (L.S. Vygotsky), A.S. Thostov interprets personal pathology as a consequence of complications and restructuring of natural functions in the processes of contact/collision of subjectivity with cultural restrictions and requirements ^[7]. We, in turn, described the acquisition of negative qualities and properties by a person as an effect of the interactions of her subjective and social worlds ^[8]. The resulting cognitive-affective distortions of the human conceptual sphere determine the "embarrassment" of his identity (e. Erickson) and the paradoxical combination of criticality towards society with uncriticism towards the program of one's life and towards intrapersonal and social disorientation.

How do maladaptive cognitions become the discourse of personality?  People, Epictetus believed, get upset not so much because of things as because of their views on them. "I have no one to rely on", "I need to constantly strain myself, pull myself out by the hair...", "I'm NOT..." (unsuitable, unattractive, etc.) ^[9]; "Others should" (treat me kindly, just as and when I want it ...); "I do not tolerate" (discomfort, frustration when things do not go as they should...), "I am a worthless person when I do not do what I have to do to win universal approval" ^[10] ... Automatic repetition of such formulas of self-sabotage or ought fixes them as frames of coping and protection, and a person obeys the mechanism of "self-fulfilling prophecy". The persistence of such cognitions correlates with the persistence of affective disorders and illogical behavior.

According to the concept of constructive alternativism, J. Kelly ^[11], our system of constructs – a set of testable hypotheses about a changing world – reveals itself in discourse when we choose between the poles of individual constructs. The starting point for all cognitive stereotypes in the construction of the world is the personal construct of identity. In discourse analysis, personal formations of the Self appear not as "self-valuable mental entities", but rather as constructs that we constantly reproduce and constitute in discourse as attributes of our communications ^[12]. A set of human speech models (words, idioms, speech formulas) corresponds to the ways of perception and interpretation of facts, conceptualization of images of the Self and the world [Cit. by: 2]. Using them, we construct our discourse and – in its acts – subjectively real versions of images of Self and Others, beliefs and emotions, experiences and meanings.

Psychologists of various theoretical orientations (S. Hart, O. Kernberg, H. Kohut, M. Mahler, J. Masterson, C. Fairbairn, etc.) assign a constitutive role to mentalization in the cognitive mechanisms of constructing the image of the self in the PLO, i.e., the biologically conditioned ability of consciousness to create a mental field of contents and their meanings. Unique and dynamic mental products – a person's knowledge and feelings of his Self, other people and relationships with them and to them and to himself – can be analytically detailed or holistic (holistic, but approximate). Integrating in the cognitive-affective fusion, all products of mentalization are operationalized in the representative theory of human consciousness – in the system of "mental models" or "theory of mind". Its subsystems are ^{[13; 14; 15; 16]}:

1.                States: bodily sensations, affects, cognitions, motives, desires, goals, needs, combined in inner experience.

2. Representations: methods of presenting the results of cognition, mediated by signs at the level of feeling, symbols at the pre-logical level and, mainly, by means of language.

3.                Abilities: to social interaction and empathy; to flexible activation of mental representations in response to a social challenge; to recognition and understanding of emotions, to emotional resonance; to self-regulation, control and modulation of affect; to symbolizing, playing, fantasizing, using humor

4.                Skills: to perceive, interpret and represent the states of oneself and others, to see oneself through the eyes of others, to understand them and oneself (with the admission of incomplete understanding), to build causal hypotheses, to construct an autobiography, to predict one's own and others' behavior

Genetically, mentalization is considered to be the earliest, preconscious phenomenon, and E. A. Sergienko and co-authors distinguish three stages of its formation ^[17]. In turn, three levels of knowledge (processes of perception, processing and understanding of information) necessary for communication are correlated with the ontogenesis of human experience ^[18]. Their comparison allows us to see certain temporal and causal dependencies between them (Table 1).

Table 1. Development of experience of experiences and mentalization in ontogenesis

As shown in Table 1, discursive and cognitive mechanisms of personality are intertwined, and their interaction determines a number of effects. Firstly, discourse is both a space and a mechanism for constructing, understanding and "playing" a person's identity, "mental entities", "sense of self". Secondly, the content of cognitions and their regulation by the personality are reflected in its discursive-linguistic formulas, and in cases of personality anomalies, the specificity of the content of cognitions is coupled with their perceptual dysregulation. Thirdly, the language of discourse constructs the reality lived by the subject in such a way that it looks true for him ^[12], ego-syntonic and not subject to criticism. Finally, the discourse reflects the habitus of a person (P. Bourdieu) – unconscious acquired patterns of perception and evaluation (habits, actions and expressions) and the principles of distribution and organization of actions in their system.

Every person, V. Wagner emphasized, including images of Self, Others and interactions with them in his experience, strives to domesticate, "domesticate" his world – to make and perceive it stable and predictable ^[19]. If the first two of the described effects of the interaction of discursive and cognitive mechanisms of personality provide mainly the specifics of its self–expression, the latter - the degree of rigidity of cognitive structures and the persistence of the corresponding emotional and personality disorders.

What conditions direct the development of mentalization and experience of experiences in the direction of PLO? Deep and egopsychology (D. Vinnikot, A. Freud, M. Klein, D. Bowlby, etc.) emphasized the importance of the "object" and intra–family emotional relationships of the child: their underdevelopment is associated with the psychopathic variant of PLO, destruction - with neurotic ^[20]. The interpersonal theory of psychiatry has shown the important role of a child's communication with significant others in internalizing patterns of social interaction and self-control. The experience of humiliating relationships for a child becomes a source of his negative personification, self-esteem and assessments of others, events and situations ^[18]. It is obvious that each of these factors, and even more so their interaction, will distort the mental representations of the child and precede the development of PLO in him.

Decisive in the formation of the "basal" Self and self–consciousness is the period up to three years, when the child only feels "what I am" - loved or rejected. As the ability and means to cognitive self-knowledge are acquired, "who am I" develops ^[17]. The immaturity of children's mentalizations explains the appearance of "self-reflecting" Self–representations ^{[9; 14]}: not being able to separate motive and result, the child fixes not the lack of empathy of the mother, but his own problem - "I don't deserve a good attitude." In turn, the appearance of the feeling of I-bad gives rise to experiences that cause "anxiety" ^[18], and the more of them, the more grandiose the I-system functions as a "guardian of personality": I-bad and Non-I are denied and repressed, and the personification of I-good is enhanced by mechanisms of selective attention and splitting. It is cleavage, according to E. Bateman and P. Fonagi ^[4], that people with PLO most often use as a protective mechanism – the most fundamental and malignant, rough and rigid, according to O. Kernberg.

Let's focus on the results of splitting the Ego. Gestalt analysis identifies three sub-selves as such: "healthy", "traumatized" and "surviving", designed to protect the Self from painful experiences by creating a compensatory false identity ^{[9; 21]}. According to O. Kernberg, the "split Self" consists of two polar and non-dialogue fragments: I am deep and real (rudimentary, devastated, weakened, envious and aggressive) and I am external (grandiose, idealized and false) ^[5]. Cognitive-affective Self- and object-representations in such a Self are quite differentiated, but diffuse, since the "good" and "bad" components of Self-images and images Others are not integrated into the whole. As a result, representations remain "dyadic" (M. Klein), mutually contradictory and unrealistic. In integrative dialectical-behavioral psychotherapy M. Lainen ^[6], the result of splitting the Ego is a dialectical failure and, as a consequence, the fixation of the subject on the thesis or antithesis and the inability to realize their polarity (dichotomy of thinking).

The results of the study. Since language mediates and personalizes our conceptual sphere, understanding and actions of our intra- and intersubjectivity, the processes of discourse, conceptualization of reality and identity construction are closely related. In turn, the accumulation of experience experiences and the development of mentalization (Table 1) directly depend on the mastery of the language system and discursive practices. Regardless of the specific weight of cognitions (understanding of social causality, etc.) and affects (emotional contribution, tone of relations, empathy) in the structure of mentalization, its deformations already at the early stages of ontogenesis can create a counter- or antisocial mentalization field. Let us denote the invariant mental mechanisms of identity construction in PLO:  

§ diffuseness of mental states in internal experience ? deficiency of mental abilities and skills;

§ unrepresented or non-integrated individual events, experiences, emotions ? impoverishment and fragmentation of the mentalization field and the space of the Self;

weakening or excessive rigidity of the external and internal boundaries of the Self and representations of "I am Another" ? violations of the exchange of information and energy between the sub–Self and between the Self and the world.

Distortions of the methods of orientation and representation of the results of cognition of the world, self and the relations between them mediated by discourse naturally generate a central feature of the PLANE – a weak, unrelated and unstable identity (Table 2) ^{[4; 20; 22]}.

Table 2. Violations of the mentalization field and their consequences

The interaction of representations and identity violations presented in the table determines the "blurriness" and partiality of the subject's social perception with PLO, his disorientation in interpersonal relationships and compensatory discursive practices. In his discourse, he uses manipulative strategies, stereotypically shifts the blame on others or accuses them of unrealistic expectations and demands, in a situation of the need for choice, convulsively "clings" to old impenetrable constructs and justifies their maladaptivity and refusal to form new constructs with his traumatic experience.

Violations of the mentalization field and their comorbid identity violations (Table 2) determine the specifics of the conceptual sphere of a subject with PLO as a way of organizing his mental space. As D.S. Likhachev rightly noted, the concept arises not from the meanings of words, but from the collision of the learned meaning with personal life experience ^[23]. Unlike concepts and meanings as products of scientific description, the concept as a perceptual-cognitive-affective formation of consciousness integrates fragments of experience and information that are meaningful, valuable to us, experienced by us (our italics are I.Sh.).

The movement of experience determines the dynamism and fundamental inhomogeneity of the conceptual sphere as knowledge about the world. It is always incoherent (our interests and roles are not systematized and changeable), it is only partially clear (we only have enough information about the probability of the situation developing), it is not free from contradictions (we are not aware of changes in content when it transitions to another level of relevance), emphasized A. Schutz ^[24]. Thus, the coherence, clarity, consistency of our concepts, "quanta of structured knowledge" about the world (E.S. Kubryakova) are limited by the degree of our need to understand and be understood.

However, a special uncritical bias in the analysis of the world and its conceptualization is determined by violations of representations and identity: being located at the intersection of discourse and social practices, they disorient the subject with the PLO in the field of possibilities and limitations of reality ^[25]. "Dialectical failure" makes borderline personality incapable ^[6]:

determine yourself, conceptualize your Self and not look for patterns (what to be, what to feel and think) in your environment;

to feel the connection with other people and not to be self-determined about each individual moment or situation of interactions;

to oppose one's Self to Another, to overcome the contradictions between them and to come to terms with the fact that one can be part of the whole and at the same time be different from others;

generalize the characteristics of mood, situation, time and demonstrate adequate signals of emotional distress in the discourse.

In a rigid cognitive coordinate system, in the conceptualization of reality ("either – or", not "and – and"), a part becomes a whole, and "they are angry with me" or an accidental failure becomes an infinite reality and "karma". Feelings of the immutability of the current state of things and the futility of its changes accompany the failures of autobiographical memory and memory for affective events, especially interpersonal, characteristic of PLO. 

Examples of conceptualization problems reflected in the subject's discourse are widely presented in cognitively oriented psychotherapy ^[10]. The essence of the "vicious circle" of cognitions and internal dialogue is revealed by D. Meichenbaum: cognitive structures determine the nature of internal speech and dialogue; their structure is a system of basic meanings/concepts of a person's Self–utterances; the degree of automatism of his maladaptive behavior depends on them, in turn. A. Ellis' rational-emotive therapy directly connects basic irrational beliefs and discursive formulas like "I should / I should / I should..." with a person's maladaptation. The focus of A. Beck's "common sense" therapy is the stereotypical, automatic or arbitrary use by a person in interpretations, expectations and self–regulation of reality-distorting "silent beliefs", "extreme opinions", persistent and diverse cognitive errors.

The imbalance between impulsive affective-sensory and rational-reflexive components in cognition is considered an invariant source of personality disorders by E.T. Sokolov ^[15]. The predominance of cognitive utility, low ("cognitive simplicity") or ultra-high and false cognitive differentiation is manifested in the concreteness of thinking, its isolation within the situation and deficits in the ability to symbolize, understand figurative meaning, imagination and empathy.

G.I. Maleychuk sees global pathological conceptualization in retroflexion ^[9]. A rapist and a rapist himself, a person tries to be not who he is, for someone who is actually his own subpersonality. In the discursive formulas of stereotypical "self-violence" there are a lot of duties, prohibitions, introjects, reflexive verbs (-s/-s).

So, distortions of the conceptual sphere of the subject from the PLO and conceptualization of objects/phenomena of the real or imaginary world by him:

firstly, they are determined in two ways: violations of the mentalization field and identity mediated by discourse, and the subject's "chained" to the flow of discourse as a result of dialectical failure;

secondly, they are implemented at the stages of determining the cognitive features of the corresponding concepts and building conceptual schemes as a set of hypotheses about the networks of values of these concepts;

thirdly, they form a specially colored system of images distorted or deformed in the process of cognitive processing – operational units of the mental lexicon, memory and the conceptual sphere connected by discourse.

The problems of mentalization and conceptualization of the subject with PLO analyzed by us explain the construction of a "theory of mind" overflowing with illusions. Illusion (Latin ludere / to play and illudere / to deceive) is not only an erroneous, inadequate perception, but also the replacement of the real and authentic with fiction, imitation, a schematic model of an object or a description of some and ignoring others, its essential qualities, its own emotional reactions, thoughts, ideas, behavior. Presenting unrealistically high standards to oneself can be combined with strong shame and self–directed hatred and anger; "active passivity" in solving interpersonal problems and difficulties – with energetic attempts to involve one's surroundings in solving them; "learned helplessness" and hopelessness - with the desire to appear more competent than they really are.

The definition of the double determinism of distortions of the conceptual sphere in the borderline personality by its discourse, the description of violations of conceptualization at its various stages and the statement of the systematic organization of the mental lexicon, memory and the conceptual sphere within the boundaries of discourse reveals the scientific novelty of our research. The scope of application of its results is the psychodiagnostics of the borderline organization of the personality and the psychocorrective effect on it. In these areas of the psychologist's activity, understanding the cognitive-discursive mechanisms of the subject's orientation in his Self and the world of relationships by studying his speech models has undoubted practical significance.

ConclusionsStereotypical speech models, or discursive formulas used by the subject in interpretations, assessments, self-regulation, reflect as products of mentalization and conceptualization the ways of processing information and constructing the conceptual sphere: the ability of the subject to variatively encode information, modify the concept, synthesize polar concepts.

The interaction of distorted mental images, concepts and conceptualization processes in the conditions of deep-rooted discourse in the structures of thinking, firstly, determines the formation of a pathological "model of the mental" and a borderline personal organization, and secondly, supports the status quo of the pathology of cognition of reality and orientation in it. As a result, the subject with PLO becomes a hostage of his "borderline" conceptual sphere and the discourse that "speaks" to him, which do not allow the possibility of reflection, honest internal dialogue and criticism of his representations of reality with its possibilities and limitations.