You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This panel, gathered to discuss the characteristics and problems of the borderline case, turned at least in its first half largely into a discussion as to whether "borderline states" existed at all.
The opening presentation was a paper by Gregory Zilboorg on "Clinical and Therapeutic Issues in So-Called Borderline Cases." Referring first to the previous definitive paper on the subject by Robert Knight two years ago, Zilboorg pointed out that selecting this subject for a panel discussion again so soon indicated a sense of incompleteness in which "we seem to seek we know not yet quite clearly what." The so-called borderline state is actually a misnomer, which Knight also felt, since he put the term in quotation marks. The trouble seems to be that we automatically think in the older Hippocratic or Kraepelinian terms, seeking for specific neurotic or psychotic mechanisms to denote specific clinical pictures, without having questioned the correctness of psychiatric nosology to begin with. The only real attempt to produce a new nosology which would represent a gradual and almost imperceptible pathological series of transitions was made by Adolph Meyer, but unfortunately this was weighted down by his static conceptions and unwieldy terminology. The major contributions toward a solution of the nosological problem were to be made by psychoanalysis, which introduced the novel concepts of typical psychological mechanisms, typical stages of libido development, and typical ego variants.