ABSTRACT
I looked upon myself like so much garbage, an anomaly, a disgrace, and, what was worse, I believed that I had allowed myself to be overrun by error because of an evil nature.
Marie Cardinal 1984
Being the object of others’ negative attention or being disregarded is like an acid which eats away at self-esteem. As we have seen, it can lead to depression or can create a vulnerability to depression if experienced early in life when the personality is forming. But there is a darker form of depression, which is linked to more extreme early experiences, particularly in infancy. This is known in the psychiatric trade as ‘borderline personality disorder’. It describes someone who is on the borderline of psychosis, prone to lose their grip on reality and liable to take their inner world for reality. For example, someone who is fearful of another person’s motives towards him may believe that she is actually trying to poison him.
