The Borderline Dilemma in Paris, Texas: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Sam Shepard

As early as the 1950s psychoanalysts were beginning to report significant changes in the forms of psychopathology they encountered, changes that seem to have emerged in response to a socio-cultural climate described by Buber (1938) as metaphysical homelessness, and by Berger (1969) and other sociological descendants of Durkheim as an increasingly pervasive anomie. Rather than the intrapsychic or neurotic conflicts of the relatively structured personality of an earlier era, the variety of psychic suffering characteristic of our postmodern condition seems to be the sense of fragmentation, estrangement, and emptiness of what Lasch (1979) has called “the narcissistic personality of our time.”

These personal and interpersonal dilemmas of the contemporary disordered self pervade the work of American playwright Sam Shepard They are the central themes of his film Paris, Texas (Palme d'Or, Cannes 1984), directed by Wim Wenders who also collaborated with Shepard on the screenplay. The following essay in comparative psychoanalysis approaches this work from two contrasting psychoanalytic standpoints, two views of the origins of pathological narcissism.