Borderline Personality Disorders: The Concept, the Syndrome, the Patient: Edited by Peter Hartocollis. New York: International Universities Press, 1977, xiv + 535 pp., $24.95.

There seems to be little doubt that borderline personality disorders are among the topics most actively debated currently by professionals in psychoanalytic, psychiatric, and related disciplines. The International Conference on Borderline Disorders, sponsored by the Menninger Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health

in 1976, was an extremely well attended, lively, and carefully organized meeting; the present volume is a collection of the formal papers presented at the conference. The editor, Peter Hartocollis, has also attempted to convey some of the thinking and atmosphere of the workshops and discussions in his preface and, to some extent, in introductions to the five sections of this ambitious volume.

The magnitude of the enterprise becomes clear if one considers that there are 28 contributors to 26 articles; that although psychiatrists predominate, almost all mental health professions are represented; and that although three quarters of the authors are from the United States, five other countries are also represented. Peter Hartocollis, Director of the C. F. Menninger Memorial Hospital and formerly its Director of Research, is an ideal editor for this volume. Born in Greece, with a Swiss medical education and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Michigan State University, he had his psychoanalytic training at the Topeka Institute, where he is now a Training and Supervising Analyst.

The various points of view represented in the book hint at some of the indefinable qualities of such a meeting: some genuine attempts at communication among people whose philosophical approaches to human functioning are far apart; massive resistances mobilized among some reluctant to venture into a different conceptual world; and the influence of charismatic styles in an area where uncertainties and confusion create a special need for direction.

It would be impossible in this review to do justice to all the papers, and their very diversity limits the generalizations t