Nincompoops, Borderline, Part 2

I once explained to a 43-year-old client that he is still a little boy, has never ascended to the adult plateau. One might think this would be insulting to him. But my explanation was so discreet and strategically euphemistic, hovering, like an angel, above bullshit by a hair's breadth, that he accepted it with equanimity. (Mildly confused equanimity.) My client was the embodiment of what I would call Radical Borderline Personality: the rudiment of all personality disorder, the person whose Inner Child has remained so prepotent over time that the adult costume is powerless to contain it, to teach it adult falsehoods.

He panicked to go to work and be around the other workers. So he took several months' leave, abandoning his wife to carry two jobs plus management of the household. This barely fazed him. Much more important – he told her – were his needs for understanding, support, hugs and love.

When the therapist meets someone this pure, he discovers that the person genuinely can't understand his error, can't grasp the validity of maturity until the therapist attacks with assiduous directness, depth psychology, and inescapable logic. That is what I did, though as said, this was clothed in gracious language.

I don't know how many clients remain too much the child. It's possible that all of them do, even the high-altitude sophisticates. I mean this. Therapy speaks, then, to a fundamental sabotage: The adult's defensive persona must be strong enough to return to childhood pain and failure without drowning in it, without becoming it. But that means that the false self must ultimately predominate.

And yet there is this diametrical contradiction to futility: It is necessary to express our losses, to grieve. It is good to cry. It is helpful to rage, as long as the rage crashes through to its founding grief. It is human nature to need to give our pain to someone and to be held.

So which is it? Is psychological healing deceptive and illusory or real? Is therapy curative, palliative, or a fantasy? Can we, should we, approach the speed of light, but never reach it?