[The first third of this three-part
story on Andy is here. Warning:
This entry includes references to, all on the part of someone else, sexually
inappropriate behavior in the workplace; less of concern, a subsequent entry
will give descriptions of starkly abnormal shows of rage or anxiety on the part
of the same person. Edits done 3/17/13.]
Subsections below:
My
comparatively successful condition, and naivete, went with a certain blindness I
had to Andy
A
more direct look at Andy’s decline
The
“sexual harassment” canard: damning by insinuation
Lessons
for today
A
thumbnail sketch of the story’s third third—including the notorious theft
This second third of Andy’s story is
derived from a 2001-02 manuscript, and hence may seem at times a little “too
ruminative,” perhaps. Then, at the end, I will tell what I will do about the
third third, where things really get dramatic.
My
comparatively successful condition, and naivete, went with a certain blindness I
had to Andy
If I was in a state of personal success
from mid-1984 to at least early 1985, why was I still not prepared to deal with
the major curve ball to eventually come from Andy?
It may seem hard to picture the overall
situation for me through about March to May 1985, whenever Andy left his MC job
and classes at GW (I think perhaps it was just before the spring semester
ended). A year earlier, in May 1984, I’d reached the height of my academic
success, with recognitions, graduation, and (quite independent of my academic
work and connections) a new, “permanent” job at the MC when I continued with my
assistant manager job (in terms of most tasks) but in a permanent version (in
terms of added features), with partial benefits, at 30 hours a week. Someone in
my position could almost be smug, but that was not my style.
On a more personal level, in early
summer 1984 (meaning, in college terms, starting in later May), I was a
shaky-legged chick just out of its eggshell, to an extent. In a general sense,
in the stage of my life when I was making the transition from student to
employee (though I anticipated getting further schooling beyond college), I was
somewhat nervous, not entirely sure of myself. As with many new graduates, I’d
just come out of a long tunnel of hard work, having toed the line of academics
and thus having conformed a lot
(though I’d tried to be creative within these parameters, too). Now I had to
decide how to pursue my postgraduate school career (which for me meant,
eventually, graduate school, though my immediate concern was a job that allowed
me to meet expenses, etc. For me, through my career-prep school years and
afterward, a practically seized-on job and a more envisioned career very rarely
were the same).
In short, I was in the ascendant as I
could only have been from years of hard academic work, but I was not entirely
sure of myself in my bearing. I didn’t yet have the nerve for a more chancy
life that I would rather be forced to get starting in 1986-87. I was still a
rather docile and sensitive sort, as students tend to be. Also, starting in May
1984, I was the casually living sort I hadn’t quite been during college, now
donating more of my time to creative-writing efforts than before.
Things seemed on as level a ground as
they’d seemed for years, in terms of my trying to be myself and not expect that
I would be thrown by “rot in my character”; perhaps things were the most
promising for me that they’d ever
been. All this shows the kind of life I seemed to have in the mid-1980s and
why, as I probably felt at the time and would generally say now, I wouldn’t
have expected a major problem with maintaining a friendship.
When Andy first revealed his heroin use
to me—probably in later fall 1984—I was surprised, perhaps disbelieving at
first. Then I took it in stride as he joked in his daring way—such as showing
me his needle, or saying he was going to shoot up in a remote bathroom on the
ground floor of the MC (as I foreshadowed in Part 8). Andy had a way of
revealing what would normally, for a drug user, have been a lot of secrets, as
if to communicate “needfully” to friends who might be shocked, and communicate
in a way that—less conscious on his part—was vaguely suicidal, or
“parasuicidal,” a term I would learn about only many years later. (A
specific little story on a coworker talking to me about Andy speaking of
suicide, and of me speaking to Andy about this as a result, does come in the
third third of my overall story on him.)
Once or more times he indicated he was
going to buy drugs (heroin, usually, I think) from one of the Housekeeping
staff, which I think was unwise from the standpoint of breaking the law and of
jeopardizing the job of the staffer (though the staffer was also partly to
blame for this). It amazed me in first writing this in 2001-02—and perhaps
should have embarrassed me—how much of this sort that I let ride at that time.
So much excusing for friends, even though at a university like that, you knew—as
I surely did, from freshman year on—that you were apt to see “all kinds that
make a world,” and you could not berate or otherwise react sharply to everyone
whose values you diverged from hugely or who were even straying into criminal
territory.
I would add in 2013 on the issue of the
source of Andy’s heroin: the Housekeeping worker who was this source was a guy
named Calvin (I do remember his last name), a Black man of about 40 or older
who seemed rather quiet and somber if not slightly sullen, and
idiosyncratically carried his walkie-talkie on a belt he slung over his
shoulder. When I heard about this (I can’t fully recall now when—I believe Andy
told me before any criminal investigation started into anything there), I was
rather surprised—conforming with the way you give any of the longtime
Housekeepers the benefit of the doubt. But I would just as quickly say that of
all the regular Housekeepers, once you were informed that Calvin could bring in
heroin, then he seemed the most
likely candidate to do it, all things about the Housekeeping crew considered. I
have no idea how Andy found Calvin could do this, but it’s not snide to say
that heroin junkies have intuitive ways of finding these things out.
As time went on and Andy was in his
downward trajectory in his last months at GW, his increased drug use, increased
work at the MC, and generally greater despair were accompanied by his being
more provocative than usual, as we will see below with some of the
sexually-related oddities; and as part of this picture, he revealed aspects of
his heroin use to me, as if in part he no longer cared about how “good” my
image of him was. In this, in a sense,
it was typical Andy, and in another sense,
it was Andy in increased trouble.
With this, I knew I couldn’t control all his behavior (partly in proportion
with the fact that I knew he wasn't like me from the beginning, and that we
were friends despite big differences). Yet, as I would learn in this case, you can see someone riding on a track to a
probable downfall and still not believe it could happen when and how it does.
A
more direct look at Andy’s decline
As Andy underwent the downturn of his
“career” at GWU, he worked at the Marvin
Center more hours per
week than before, and seemed to lose
himself in that kind of busy-ness while he didn’t quite yet admit he was giving
up on school: this is one way to interpret what happened through early
1985.
What his personal problems all exactly were, in a general sense, I
don’t know. He was a heroin addict; I
think he was a borderline personality of a sort, but this diagnosis doesn’t
tell you everything in some cases. He apparently had some level of a bad time
as the only male of a set of four siblings, the others of whom were successful
achievers, including his (younger?) sister Emilie who, I think, was attending,
or had attended, an Ivy League college and did well.
The 2001-02 version of this story on him
fairly confidently interpreted him as, in part, a borderline personality.
Two descriptions above certainly reflect the feeling you can have from such a
person, when you think you’ve gotten to know the person fairly well and yet
find you don’t entirely: (1) “…in a sense, it was typical Andy, and in another
sense, it was Andy in increased trouble”; and (2) “…you can see someone riding
on a track to a probable downfall and still not believe it could happen when
and how it does.”
To put another idea I would have
formulated in 2001-02, I think part of his character was that he had a bit of a
sexual identity problem. This is hard to firmly
conclude, because he was ostensibly a secure enough heterosexual; he talked
about and demonstrated in certain ways that he pursued a heterosexual
relationship. (For instance, there was a girl he knew from New York who came to
D.C. and he spent the night with her—and they didn’t exactly play backgammon;
and we also joked along sexual lines about a woman who worked at the Info Desk
or worked elsewhere in the MC, named Jeannie Trombly. And he also, much later,
married a [non-Jewish] woman, as his obit says.)
Today, in 2013, I would say that his
sexually related aberrations were “secondary” to his having a broader identity
problem (i.e., borderline personality) that was part of the main basis for his
substance abuse. That is, if he was largely a borderline personality, a sort of
thing often associated with substance abuse, and his descending into increased
substance abuse either paralleled or
conditioned his worsening borderline condition—I think it’s very hard to
say how much his snowballing failure as a student set up the increased heroin
use, or vice versa—then the “sexually
confused” behaviors he exhibited could have been an attribute of a larger
borderline problem, and not simply his “main problem” or something with as much
weight as his borderline/addiction problem. (See End note.)
This is actually useful (I think,
depending on the practical need for it) to try to trace out in other
substance-abusing people, when they seem to get into apparent bisexual or
homosexual relations when under the influence: they could well be primarily
heterosexual, but if their personal problems largely stem from borderline
personality disorder, exacerbated by substance abuse, then it is a sort of
incidental “passing deviation” that they seem to engage in apparent
GLBT-relations line-crossing. What is key is knowing they are primarily a
sufferer of BPD (which of course can be highly demanding on close others in its
own right).
But in any event, Andy’s and my
relationship, as it declined, long puzzled me. (Maybe it’s somewhat less
puzzling now; but also, due to passage of time, it seems more like water under
the bridge.) I’ve thought at times that it had elements of a pairing of two
bisexuals (I say this just as a way of “drawing a picture of the oddity” without granting that this sexual
orientation held true for either of us). But I never used to approach him in a
sexual way, and I’ll tell you a few things that happened that surprised me with
how he regarded our friendship.
In the last few months before he left
GW, which was sometime between March and May 1985, the following items occurred
between us that relate one way or another to sexuality, and their general
nature, as meaning embarrassment for me, I’ll comment on after I list them:
* Weird use of a term for our friendship.
Once he referred to our “relationship,” not “friendship,” which surprised and
embarrassed me a bit. I thought maybe he was making a creative use of the word “relationship”
for what friendship we had—he was a fairly literate sort. I wondered if he
mistook what my affection for him, such as it was, amounted to. If he thought I
hung around him because he thought I had a bisexual (or homosexual) interest in
him, this was a strange misunderstanding for what (in my view) should have
appeared clearly to have been a fun and long-term friendship. And he never
brought up the idea that I had some kind of erotic interest in him at any other
time, which, if he was an offended heterosexual, you would think he would have.
But then, if he was bisexual, maybe he thought (or wondered if) I was too, and that I gravitated to him
because of this—while perhaps he thought he
didn't so gravitate. On the other hand, if he had some erotic interest in our friendship, why had he never
indicated it at any other time? It was almost as if he suspected our friendship was closer to an erotic “relationship,” more
because of me than because of him, hence he referred to it as a “relationship,”
as if to put the onus of that identification on me. This sounds like a lot of
paranoid supposition, but however you want to analyze it, I’ve always felt that
his use of the word “relationship” was insinuating and surprising, and a little
disappointing.
* Badly bawdy joking-around in the office.
When his heroin use was more frequent and he clearly was more open about it to
me and a few others, and when he was generally in a state of increased despair
about school, he joked with me (more than once, I think) in the truly
line-crossing way of chasing me around the MC administrative office late one
evening with his penis hanging out of his pants, as if he would touch me with it.
I duly ran away from him. For me, this was a little too much, even for his kind of occasionally irreverent,
provocative joking.
The
“sexual harassment” canard: damning by insinuation
Here is the start of something that is very
relevant today.
Sometime in the last months of our
friendship, he had a running theme in passing talk, which seemed to gather
steam as he (in retrospect) was getting generally more frustrated with his
life, of threatening to claim that I had engaged in “sexual harassment” of him.
I can’t fully remember what this was in regard to—but (in 2001-02) it seems to
come back to me that I joked with him and teased him about (or very indirectly
about?) some sexually related matters, not as if I was bullying or “trying to
provoke” him, and probably in large part this was because he set up the pretexts for this, in his typical sometimes gross
ways of joking. (I would agree with this brief account, originally written in
2001-02, even in 2013.)
When talking more “to the point,” he would
joke with a somewhat veiled rehearsal of what he suggested was a complaint he
would make about me: it came in response to something discrete (specific,
limited) I did, he registered his response with a jokingly dramatic-singsong, “Sexual
harassment!” On its face this seemed rather sophomorically extreme, on a par
with the black-humorous things we used to say in better times; but what looks a
little creepy about it in retrospect is his being habitual and almost
fetishistic with it, as he was. Certainly, from a most sober perspective, I
didn’t engage in sexual advances toward him. But one time he was clearly
frustrated at me—I may have teased him once too often, or maybe I somehow
inconvenienced him regarding work—and he engaged in a rough, tactical way to
get the upper hand.
As wildly unrealistic as it has always
seemed to me, he actually finally lodged a complaint of sexual harassment
against me with our boss Donald Cotter, one of our supervisors.
This was very embarrassing to me. You
recall from Part 1 in the series that the culture of the
administrative staff included several of them being homosexuals. Part of the
trick of dealing with Andy’s claim was dealing with what I thought would be a
“tide” of semi-assumptions on the parts of Mr. Cotter and others that maybe I
was, lo and behold, a homosexual, which was not true. (Funny, but I don’t think
anyone among the administration suggested this “conclusion” to me in any form.)
I don’t think it is homophobic—or, it
certainly wouldn’t have been then—to
say that, in that environment where there was normally liberality about there
being several homosexuals on the staff—and while the far more deviant and
intolerable situation of the bathroom gays was an “unending” problem at the
MC—it posed a particularly weird challenge for me to field this sexual
harassment claim of Andy’s (even aside from how “shaky” in self-confidence I
was as I described early in this entry). (By the way, if Andy was “shaky” in
his own right with his drug problem, and with his sexual identity being a bit
shaky secondary to this, the environment at the MC of the homosexual staffers
and the bathroom problem maybe made for an environment that got his head spinning regarding “the sexual
identity atmosphere,” too. But it didn’t excuse his being clearly reckless with
his complaint against me.)
And even if I was homosexual, I felt that for me to engage in sexual harassment,
with Andy of all people, was not my style.
Obviously, to talk about this today,
almost 30 years after the fact, with the changes in social morés as there are, is
a bit awkward: I seem too abstract, hokey, stilted…. And it’s important to note
that as college-age people, despite all the “atmospheric distractions,” we had
a sense of identity and purpose that kept us coursing along on our own tracks.
But with Andy, our courses were becoming increasingly divergent and weirdly apt
to lead to friction.
Today, as we see from many examples in
the media and in our personal experience, “sexual harassment” is the sort of
complaint that, initially and on its face, seems to “prove itself by being
claimed,” i.e., it is so disturbing and “apparently based on obvious facts”
that people are sooner apt to believe it—as if evidence to the contrary could
be considered, but was as semi-negligible as it was lacking—than to be
skeptical or judiciously reserved about agreeing with it.
In 1985, I was embarrassed partly
because I felt (even if for a very short time) as if I was, as I suggested, required to prove that I wasn’t
homosexual or bisexual, and more importantly (from an objective viewpoint) that
I hadn’t been so gross in behavior as to engage in sexual harassment with Andy.
But how could you prove this?
I think the more obvious “basis for
concern” for me in his complaint—and I don’t recall if this was addressed at
all—is that relations between me and Andy—of a coworkerly sort—had, in
management’s view, deteriorated to the extent that he submitted this sort of
complaint. As to this aspect, I don’t know if anything was said to me about it,
or otherwise done.
Somehow, in 1985, new to this sort of
issue, I dealt with it in the way of mitigating what I hoped would be regarded
by Mr. Cotter (and whoever else dealt explicitly with the complaint—which I
think was no one) as a misunderstanding
and ignoring it to an extent, in accordance with the fact (in my mind) that no
sexual harassment had ever happened. In later years I would regard this as the sort of complaint that was—not so
obvious at the very start—not taken
terribly seriously by management, and somehow was “handled” by not being
handled at all. I think I was surprised how this complaint quickly became
“water under the bridge.”
When we come to the theft issue of later
in 1985, we will see that Andy was apparently suspected of having committed the
theft much more quickly than I would have expected, so perhaps Mr. Cotter (earlier)
had quietly felt that Andy, with his personal problems, was really the only
issue behind the “sexual harassment” claim. (I don’t know if I hypothesized
quite this at the time.)
(At a large publisher at which I did
temp work in 1995-96, I would experience an accusation, in part made directly to
me, of some kind of harassment from a young woman who was also a substance
abuser and who was more clearly a borderline personality, and who even had
paranoid traits. But the shakiness of her claim against me was shown by the
fact that, after a while, it was evident that she not only had complaints about
me, but about everyone else [mostly males] in our temp group of about seven or
so. It could be concluded that these two instances of accusations of sexual
harassment that I’ve been witness to—Andy’s and the 1995-96 one—have been
phenomena that include mean insinuation—a
kind of resort to a somewhat devious form of hardball office politics—and suspect, arguably transiently psychopathic,
accusers from relatively privileged backgrounds. These facts have been key
to my gauging sexual harassment insinuations or claims at other times.)
Lessons
for today
As I look back, Andy seems to have been
more disturbed than I was willing to grant at the time. That was part of the problem for me, my not granting how disturbed he
was. I trusted him; we were friends; then as a result of his personal problems,
our friendship was insidiously—and ultimately abruptly—undermined. It was
almost as if he suddenly felt trapped in his overall life at GW and he had to punch a way out.
More relevant for today, this was the
first, and weirdest, example of an instance of a sexual harassment claim I was
ever faced with. And taking this into consideration with a few others over the
years, I would say that anyone who keeps
a diary, or otherwise “builds ammunition” lest a ridiculous work issue of the
“harassment” kind blows up, should keep on the lookout for a few factors in
someone likely to claim sexual harassment: evidence of substance abuse; evidence of a personality disorder; a
background suggesting the person is spoiled; and evidence or suggestions of
other deviant behavior, such as criminality.
A
thumbnail sketch of the story’s third third—including the notorious theft
I am torn between hustling this story
out and being careful with it. Funny thing: my memory of it all—in fact, of
much of my MC life—seems both a little fuzzy in places and organized very differently from how I would remember work issues in
quite a span of later years. When at GW and immediately after (say, 1986, after
I was back in New Jersey), my mind seemed tooled to a college student’s way of
dealing with life crises and “things simply to learn from books”: a college student is all about gathering
bona fides and tools for a future career, and this comprises matters of, in a
word, identity—things you “hang on
yourself” like tools on racks in a workshop. For someone in this mode, memories
of interpersonal travails, it would seem, are similarly “subject-predicate” or
“personal-property–type”: they are “romantic” in the broadly cultural sense
(not sexual sense), defined as (1) whole tropes, (2) maybe shadowy, (3) ideas
to aim toward, and/or (4) broad/gothic memories and accounts that you are
passionate about.
Once you get into a more professional
life, especially if you work in a very circumstance-defined, change-apt, often
bitterly competitive environment like New Jersey, then you become much more
oriented to pragmatics, to transient dealings and circumstances—stuff good for
a diary of everyday minutiae (or records compiled against the possible
eventuality of a lawsuit), not so much the self-contained “big,
purpose-oriented chiaroscuro battles and glowing ideals” that are your stock in
trade in college.
Because I was of a more
“college-romantic” mind in 1985, not yet the pragmatist of later, my memories
of the theft issue are tricky to assemble. But instead of rework the 2001-02
account, which is detailed but needs careful editing, I here often a 2013-style
“talking points” synopsis (and this from memory, before I check any other
reference):
* In about April 1985, one night (at
7-something in the evening, perhaps), two cashier-type bags containing parking
tickets—which were essential to commuters’ parking in the MC garage, and cost I
don’t remember how many dollars each—were stolen from the safe in the MC
administrative office. (These bags were made of cloth and were zipper-closed
and locked with padlocks.)
* The doors of the office were locked
when this happened. It was quickly suspected that the theft was an inside job,
because no outsider would have known quite where to locate the bags of tickets,
much less get in to where they were (which required getting past one or two
locked doors, and knowing the combination to the safe, which in the evening
only we building managers knew).
* At the time of the theft, I was away
from the office, and Andy, who was working that night, was out at lunch. I
think there was another student manager working, and I don’t remember where he
was at the time (but I think he was readily enough ruled out as a suspect by
Security). (Andy, of course, could have taken the bags just prior to leaving
for lunch.)
* I forget when I heard about the theft,
but quickly enough (within a day or so), the GW Security office was involved,
as were the D.C. police. I think the two bags of tickets had a combined value
of $1,000 or so.
* A detective with Security—I hadn’t
even known GW Security had its own detective until this situation—interviewed
all of us who had been working that night at his office, in due time.
* When I was interviewed, I believe it
became clear that I wasn’t considered a prime suspect, and the fact that Andy
was regarded as such became clear enough, especially when I found that it was
known by the detective, and apparently by some MC staffer(s) who evidently had
spoken with him, that Andy had a heroin problem. Following is an intriguing tidbit I offer to show today’s young people
that, in your twenties, as wise as you feel you are about some things, you are
still apt to make dumb mistakes due to naivete: when the detective asked if
I knew Andy had been taking heroin, I said no! Why? I thought I would protect
Andy merely in terms of his job situation being jeopardized by his drug use.
Later (in rationalization mode, but regretful), I would feel that this denial
did not materially jeopardize the Security office’s investigation of the theft
in any way. They knew he was using heroin, anyway.
* In the immediate aftermath of the
detective speaking with me, when I told Andy I had lied about his heroin use to
the detective, he said, “Well you have to tell them the truth!” or such. That
amazed me at the time, and still surprises me today—that he would assert that
to me, as deviant as he had been in other ways beforehand tied to his heroin
use. (Of course, I would not take that same kind of tack in later years—lie on
behalf of a friend in that way, in that kind of situation.)
* I don’t think this crime was ever
solved—at least not while I was still working at the MC.
* What was deeply puzzling about this April
1985 situation to me then, and would remain so for many years, is that though
Andy seemed as likely a suspect as anyone—he had been away from the building
right at the time of the theft, and used a car to leave for lunch; and of
course, as I find from (non-MC-worker) listeners to this story over the years,
his heroin use made him likely (in a general-profile sense) as a thief in this
matter—Andy also knew that those parking tickets could not be fenced on the
street, to be used back at GW as the only place they could be used, without their being identified by their
serial numbers (in fact, recording serial numbers of the parking tickets
was a chore all us managers knew about), which you would figure could lead a
police investigator to find who had fenced the tickets, etc.
* It struck me that if Andy had stolen
the tickets, it was a pointless exercise, because he could not sell them to get
quick cash. So why, then, did he steal
them (if he did)?
* This question leads me to the most
probing point about how bad things were getting for Andy at that time: he was
failing school; he was spiraling through increased heroin use; his friendships
(as with me) were (as far as I could see) fraying. If a notorious theft at the
MC occurred, this could “serve his needs” as a “real reason to leave” in two
ways: as an impulsive act, it spelled out (to whomever it mattered) his
despair, as part and parcel of his finally leaving school for good (this is, of
course, a psychopathic manner of self-expression); and more comprehensibly, if he was suspected of doing the theft, but denied
the suspicion rigorously, he could use that (“they suspected me, and didn’t
give proof”) as a pretext (or partial pretext) for leaving the GW community.
* Indeed, one night when he was driving
me home (as he had done a few times over prior months), I summoned the courage
and asked him if he had stolen the tickets. How I did it is worth the “tedious”
recounting, on the proper occasion. He had an arguably sly, but inscrutable way
of answering. I didn’t have an unambiguous answer from him. And that turned out
to be almost the complete end of our friendship. He would leave the MC job very
shortly after that—resigning, I think in light of his leaving school as a student
(in fact, I think I already knew he was generally, imminently leaving the GW
area when I was on that last drive home).
* I would meet with him again, about a
year and a half later, in November 1986, in D.C. when I visited the city briefly.
That was the last time I saw him.
* Prior to all this theft situation, for
a relatively brief period in early 1985, he engaged in suicidal “threats” that,
after an R.A. who was working in the MC talked to me about them, I addressed Andy
about (I was pretty much a greenhorn in doing so). That also makes for an
interesting little account, given in Part 10 of this series. (This will relate to the very interesting topic of
parasuicide.)
In a work context, Andy was the most
troubled person I ever had to respond to in resourceful ways (and as young as I
was, I was not most adept in all
this), in terms of all of three things: (1) his mental illness, (2) his rather
grossly intruding drug issue, and (3) an actual criminal episode where his
complicity in this was never clear but certainly worth suspecting.
I have not dealt with quite such a ball
of gross “unprofessionalism”—a weirdly interconnected set of deviations from
professionalism—erupting in an office setting in all my varied work life until,
let’s say, a somewhat similar one fairly recently.
One lesson becomes clear enough, before
I get to the third third of his story (and I don’t quite know when I’ll have it
posted): if a young person has a
substance abuse problem plus a personality disorder and his or her issues boil
over into a gross intrusion on the work environment, the situation is all the
worse when the person comes from a background that has spoiled him or her.
##
End
note. On substance abuse, see the relevant detail
noted here. Also, on both substance abuse and sexual behavior, one
statement in the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, Fourth Edition [Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric
Association, 1994]) is relevant but rather jumbles different phenomena
together unhelpfully: “The pattern of behavior seen in Borderline Personality
Disorder [BPD] has been identified in many settings around the world.
Adolescents and young adults with identity problems (especially when
accompanied by substance use) may transiently display behaviors that
misleadingly give the impression of [BPD]. Such situations are characterized by
emotional instability, … conflicts about sexual orientation, and competing
social pressures to decide on careers. …” (p. 652)
On sexual orientation, the book I Hate You—don’t leave me: Understanding the
Borderline Personality, by Jerold J. Kreisman, M.D., and Hal Straus (New
York: Avon, 1989), includes an interesting point: “Sexual orientation is also
part of the borderline’s role confusion. In line with this theory, some
researchers estimate a significantly increased rate of homosexuality,
bisexuality and sexual perversions among borderlines” (p. 74), and it
references this statement with a study from 1987 and an article by the renowned
expert on BPD, Otto Kernberg, from 1967.
Statements regarding sexuality in the
book on BPD by Jerome Kroll, M.D., The
Challenge of the Borderline Patient (New York: Norton, 1988), are very
interesting, but are mainly concerned with the “countertransference” process
and with ethical concerns regarding clinicians, rather than much about the BPD
patient’s personal style, so I will omit citations from that here.
