Unhappy, driven by rage and a thirst for self-destruction, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova from Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot evokes complex feelings in us. What and why — we understand together with a psychologist.
It is difficult to feel sincere sympathy for Natastya Filippovna. The beauty, whose borderline organization of the psyche allows her to live only in a storm of passions, also draws us into a whirlwind of affects, illogical and redundant from the point of view of an outside observer. And therefore, our feelings and attitude towards her are just as changeable: we either empathize with her pain, recognizing her childhood traumatic history with early molestation and use, then we admire her ability to subordinate everyone around her to her will, then we are perplexed, watching her inconsistency and passion for destruction. .
Like all borderline organized people, she does not experience her drama — she plays it out in the hope of easing pain, getting satisfaction, finding peace. Her torment, rage and thirst for self-destruction are so great that they cannot be processed mentally, they break out and capture everyone who approaches her. All the characters become representations of different parts of her psyche, and therefore they are all needed, it is impossible to get rid of them, and they cannot leave her, being captured by the important role that they unconsciously play.
And each of them also has its own «Nastasya Filippovna» — deceived, suffering, incapable of love. She says and does everything that they would like, but do not dare. Therefore, they follow her so fascinated and become witnesses of the drama played out to the tragic ending, unable to save either her or themselves from a violent desire to punish at least someone for a broken fate.
They are among us
You will meet people with a border organization almost everywhere. They pull you into their life and history, unconsciously forcing you to be something you didn’t even intend to be. You can save them, love them, give them your last shirt, but if you do even the smallest of what was not expected, you will immediately be anathema: in the easiest option, they will be mortally offended and will not want to have anything to do with you, in the difficult — they can take revenge, trying to take out all the pain for internal devastation on you.
They capture you, in their field you live in peak experiences: love — so to the grave, passion — so heaven will tremble, if grief, then deadly, if rage, then murderous. They do not control their lives or their affects, and it will be difficult for you to have any control in this whirlwind of emotions and drives.
If you are tired of your boring, built and predictable life, then Nastasya Filippovna will certainly appear on your horizon. The best thing we can do is to discover it and get to know it within ourselves, otherwise it will happen outside and no longer of our will.