The Accidental Sociopath

My partner and I often discuss the film, Girl, Interrupted, as a blurred portrait of the borderline/sociopath.  In the film, the borderline personality is the main character, Susannah, played by Winona Ryder, but the character we both think most people see as borderline in the film is Lisa, played by Angelina Jolie. Lisa, however, is a sociopath.  (For Angelina's critique of the film, click here.)  Part of the reason we imagine this blurred portrait happens is that the general public misconceives of borderline personality as a standard sociopath.  Someone who will, as a therapist once described to me, cut your throat and laugh while you bleed out on the floor.  This is partly a problem of misinformation, partly a problem of cultural and professional bias against borderline personalities as difficult, scary, or overwhelming, and partly a problem of there being something a little bit true in the blurring of these two types.  There are moments when borderlines skid sideways into sociopathy:

Clearly there are fundamental differences between borderline personalities and sociopaths, differences which I appreciate. At the same time, when the borderline personality’s rage or desperation is evoked, one sees (and not rarely) responses that can closely correspond to the sociopath’s calculating, destructive mentality.

Once inside this mentality, I’m suggesting that borderline personality-disordered individuals can lapse into a kind of transient sociopathy. Commonly, victims of the “borderline’s” aberrant, vicious behaviors will sometimes react along the lines of, “What is wrong with you? Are you some freaking psychopath?” They will say this from the experience of someone who really has just been exploited as if by a psychopath.

Because this isn’t the borderline personality’s default mentality (it is the sociopath’s), several psychological phenomena must occur, I think, to enable his temporary descent into sociopathy. He or she must regress in some way; dissociate in some fashion; and experience a form of self-fragmentation, for instance in response to a perceived threat—say, of abandonment.

These preconditions, I suggest, seed the borderline personality’s collapse into the primitive, altered states of self that can explain, among other phenomena, his or her chilling (and necessary) suspension of empathy. This gross suspension of empathy supports his or her “evening the score” against the “victimizer” with the sociopath’s remorseless sense of entitlement.

-Steve Becker,  
"The Borderline Personality as Transient Sociopath"

For the most part, this article by Steve Becker trips my internal Borderline Bias Alarm System.  Lights flash.  Sirens set my teeth on edge.  For one thing, it's posted on a blog called LoveFraud.  Ick.   The article is part of the dense cyberforest of anti-borderline treatises, rants, warnings, and notes of regret posted to the web by non-borderlines about borderlines.  So I take what Steve Becker says with a grain of salt.

However.

I'm intrigued by the idea of the transient sociopath.  It rolls off the tongue like the accidental tourist or armchair psychologist or incidental charges.

If you read the chapters, "Rocket Girl" and "Tantrum Artist," in Girl in Need of a Tourniquet, you will see that I descended into near-psychosis as a result of remaining suspended for too long in an affair with an unavailable lover.  I didn't have thoughts of "evening the score," as Becker says, but I definitely regressed, dissociated, and experienced temporary self-fragmentation.  I lingered on the psychotic end of the neurotic-psychotic borderline spectrum.  I collapsed, on occasion, into primitive, altered states of consciousness.

So.  What do you think of Becker's ideas about borderline personality and transient sociopathy?  

Do admissions (like my own) of a borderline breakdown that blurs lines between crazy-borderline and crazy-sociopathic risk further misidentifications of and biases towards the borderline personality?

Has your borderline personality ever threatened to trade hats with its sociopathic best friend?

What are we to make of this intersection of diagnoses?