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Personality
On the Edge with Austen's Lady Susan: BPD
Borderline Personality Disorder features unstable, shifting moods and rages.
Posted April 3, 2019
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is one of the “Cluster B” personality disorders in the DSM-5. (I’ve discussed Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder in previous posts.) Its symptoms, such as rage, would have been even more unacceptable in Jane Austen’s decorous and polite society. Even in private conversations, a degree of self-control and etiquette was de rigeur. This might be one reason behavior associated with BPD appears only in an early work, Lady Susan. In addition, Austen’s interests turned to portraying strong, admirable heroines who certainly don’t suffer from personality disorders. And while in her subsequent novels we witness pathologies in characters, she never again features a disturbed character up close as she does in Lady Susan.
We can diagnose the eponymous Lady Susan with BPD according to DSM-5 criteria: BPD is characterized by “a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked by impulsivity.” Lady Susan has five requisite symptoms (out of nine) that confirm a diagnosis:
- Frantic efforts to avoid abandonment.
- A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternation between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
- Inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger.
- Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood.
- Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (Lady Susan’s illicit affairs and defiance of propriety qualify).
James Masterson theorized the origins of BPD. Like the other Cluster B disorders, BPD is thought to originate in deficits in attachment between a primary caregiver and a child. The caregiver of the child who develops BPD puts their own need for support, comfort, and love above those of the child. Their primary wish, perhaps subconscious, is to keep the child “enmeshed,” psychologically fused with him/herself. The child’s efforts towards self-activation and autonomy are punished by withdrawal of love.
While the child’s innate drive for autonomy persists, so does the terror of abandonment, the price of autonomy. And so the person with BPD yearns for relationships but craves total control in such relationships in order to avoid abandonment. Those who fail to grant such control invoke their rage, which is not only a protest but also a defense against the abandonment depression.
You might think of BPD as an anxious-ambivalent attachment on steroids. In addition, because the caregiver does not acknowledge the child’s inner thoughts and feelings, the child fails to develop empathy, which is acquired largely through seeing one’s own interiority reflected and validated by others.
When Lady Susan begins, the recently widowed Lady Susan has been staying at the home of her friends, the Manwarings, where she caused no end of trouble by having an affair with her host. When the situation there becomes too hot to handle, she decides to visit her brother-in-law, Mr. Vernon. She has a motive in addition to needing somewhere to go: She is determined to make Sir Reginald de Courcy, Mr. Vernon’s brother-in-law and the heir to his family’s fortune, fall in love with her. [These relationships are somewhat complicated. Mr. Vernon is Lady Susan's late husband’s brother, and Sir Reginald is his brother-in-law, Mr. Vernon's wife's brother.] Although this would provide Lady Susan with a secure income, which she needs, such pragmatic motives take a back seat to her compulsive yearning for homage, which she seeks in intimate or potentially intimate relationships—typical borderline behavior.
Sir Reginald is a particularly alluring target. Lady knows that he dislikes and distrusts her, and with good reason; her reputation is not exactly pristine, and Sir Reginald takes pride in his own upright morals and behavior. By daring to disapprove of her in the past, he has made himself her particular enemy and hence her goal is to humble him. In psychotherapeutic terms, Sir Reginald has evoked the limits to Lady Susan’s power by his resistance, and this threatens to lead to the abandonment depression, the melancholy and emptiness that looms when she fails to control others.
Lady Susan’s other plan is to force her daughter, Frederica, to marry a ridiculous man, a fop, who actually finds Lady Susan more attractive than her daughter. Frederica abhors the idea of this match. Although forced marriages were not condoned in Austen’s time, social norms have no power over Lady Susan. Displaying the lack of empathy characteristic of BPD, Lady Susan disregards her daughter’s feelings, and in fact, plans to delight in torturing the girl. After all, Frederica has dared to protest this marriage, to separate her own feelings and tastes from those of her mother. (We can see here how the desire for enmeshment and the BPD it instigates can be intergenerational. Fortunately, Lady Susan cared too little about her daughter to interact with her. Raised by others, Frederica shares none of her mother’s pathological traits).
When Frederica asks Sir Reginald’s help in averting the marriage, Lady Susan’s borderline rage emerges. Sir Reginald is sympathetic to Frederica, and Lady Susan can’t bear this challenge to her domination. She loses control, angrily raging against Sir Reginald, and she is so obnoxious that he determines to break with her. But Lady Susan soon regains her equilibrium and repairs her relationship with Sir Reginald so thoroughly, that, to the horror of his family, they become engaged.
Lady Susan in her triumph confesses to a friend:
"Oh, how delightful it was, to watch the variations of his countenance while I spoke, to see the struggle between returning tenderness and the remains of displeasure. There is something agreeable in feelings so easily worked on. Not that I would envy him the possession, nor would for the world have such myself, but they are very convenient when one wishes to influence the passion of another."
The lack of tender feelings—feelings like love and compassion—as well as lack of the capacity for empathy and authentic honest relationships, characterizes BPD and other personality disorders. Lady Susan might not consciously know what she is missing, but what you don’t know does indeed hurt, precluding the comfort of emotional connection that is the birthright of every mammal.
References
American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Washington D. C.: American Psychiatric Publishing.
Austen, Jane (1975). Lady Susan/ The Watsons/ Sanditon. New York: Penguin Books. [Lady Susan was originally written in 1794 and first published in 1871).
Jones, Wendy (2017). Jane on the Brain: Exploring the Science of Social Intelligence with Jane Austen. New York: Pegasus.
Masterson, James F. (2000). The Personality Disorders: A New Look at the Developmental Self and Object Relations Approach: Theory-Diagnosis-Treatment. Phoenix, AZ.: Zeig, Tucker, and Theisen.
