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Most psychiatric conditions that are troublesome in major and even minor ways have terms in general language or slang that correspond to our psychiatric terms for them. Granted, some are imperfect in their precision (that is, more imperfect than any version of the DSM or ICD). Some are vague, like “nervous breakdown,” but some, like melancholia, are so richly descriptive in their history that we have borrowed them back. Granted melancholia has nothing to do with black bile, but Robert Burton's 1638 Anatomy of Melancholy embraces an almost perfect phenomenology of the syndrome. Other terms, like “panic” and “phobia” are simply lifted from general language. Bleuler's coinage of “schizophrenia” has been widely borrowed back from general language to mean “split personality,” but retains a connotation of “psychotic” for many who understand the distinction from multiple personality. That it is the handles of affective loading that are split from the cognitive and perceptual freight of thought is little understood.
Lacking common descriptive terms, borderline dynamics remain invisible as well as innominate for most people. Understanding in general parlance of what is meant by labeling a patient “borderline” is almost nonexistent. Why is this? The question was raised by the long-suffering ex-husband of a borderline woman who typically disavows and projects her emotional states to those around her, and moreover, in characteristic borderline fashion, makes them feel, express, or enact for her what she experiences out of awareness. She employs her children as “rage mules” to ferry her angry affects to him, affects for which in their immaturity the children have been inadequate and overflowing