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.
The concept of the double bind originated in the 1950s with the Palo Alto Group led by Gregory Bateson, who proposed it as an explanation for schizophrenia. A double bind occurs when a person is subjected to two or more contradictory messages, often conveyed at different levels of communication, from which there is no escape and no opportunity to comment on the contradiction. Whatever the person does is wrong.
In their most famous paper, “Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Bateson et al. (1956) wrote, “From this theory is derived a description, and the necessary conditions for, a situation called the ‘double bind’—a situation which no matter what a person does, he ‘can’t win.’”
Classic examples include a parent who verbally expresses love while conveying rejection through tone or behavior, then punishes the child for reacting to the........