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Michael Porder's presentation began with a detailed and comprehensive chronology of analytic thought regarding borderline phenomena. Freud distinguished between the neuroses and the psychoses, based on differences in reality testing, defensive structure, and contrasting types of libidinal attachment. Historically, this preceded the differentiation of a third class of disorder, identified by Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann, whose investigations placed it between the other categories on the basis of ego and superego functions and deficits.
Porder continued his overview noting the inclusion of the concepts of loss of ego boundaries, the “as-if” personality, and the first use of the term “borderline,” coined by Stern to describe individuals in whom failures of early mothering provided the soil for the pathological narcissism underlying this condition.
Melanie Klein described how failures of early development led to the use of the primitive defenses of splitting and projective identification to prevent collapse of the ego. Klein's work led to a ferment in the study of early ego development. Porder briefly outlined the work of those theorists who questioned the capacity of borderline patients to benefit from psychoanalysis, of Gunderson, who defined the Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and of Frosch, who determined that a fixed, stable diagnostic entity was involved.
The presentation then turned to Kernberg's concept of the Borderline Personality Organization which, while including the aforementioned primitive defenses, articulated the concept of identity diffusion and located the developmental origin of the disorder within the rapprochement period.