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Eve and Susan Leeman have discussed the basic neuronal metaphors of connectedness and plasticity that may be applied to interpersonal relatedness. The topic is rich. Many other cellular correspondences with the macroscopic personal world could be explored. For example, Dyall, Brown, and Johnson (2004) have described the cellular acquisition of mitochondria and plastids via ancient invasions by eubacteria through symbiosis more than a billion years ago. The symbionts lost their eubacterial identity and became oraganelles. Similarly, introjects of parental imagos and other interpersonal representations are also subtly transformed and used by a person.
Analysis of obsessive interpersonal defense mechanisms quite rapidly turns to thoughts of barrier (boundary) breaching, and the obsessive concern with invasion and contamination of the self system brings to mind the metaphor of a membrane. If all of our selves could be construed as possessing a bounding membrane, the obsessive person's membrane would seem to be more problematic. Perhaps the analogy might be the blood-brain barrier in comparison to the more easily penetrated capillaries of the body generally. According to recent research, the capillaries in the brain are “cemented together by junctions so tight that even ions have a hard time squeezing through” (Miller, 2002, p. 1116). The metaphor is timely. Transport across the blood-brain barrier is of increased interest as pharmaceutical researchers reconsider that their previous “small-molecule approach to CNS [central nervous system] drug development is fundamentally flawed” (p. 1116), and many more CNS drugs would be possible if larger molecules could pass. The metaphor can be applied further to the obsessive self barrier. Molecules can cross the blood-brain barrier “only if they are escorted by the choosy transport proteins or if they are small enough and lipid-friendly enough to pass through one side of the endothelial cells and out the other” (p. 1116). The “tran