Borderline Phenomena And The Rorschach Test

Edited by Jay S. Kwawer, Howard D. Lerner, Paul M. Lerner & Alan Sugarman. New York: Int. Univ. Press, 1980, xvii + 505 pp., $23.50.

For better (as an incarnation of the living past) or for worse (as a stubborn adherence to internal presences destined to populate both analytic hour and everyday life), every transference involves an element of repetition, a compulsion to do to and to be done to as before. Surely there is an element of transference repetition in this important new book "dedicated to Merton M. Gill and Roy Schafer and to the memory of David Rapaport," the authors of the monumental Diagnostic Psychological Testing. Indeed, the reader can palpably feel the anxiety of their influence stalking the pages of a book which has repeated both the strengths and the weaknesses of its intellectual ancestor. Reviewers of Diagnostic Psychological Testing lauded the clinical wisdom, the theoretical brilliance, simultaneously apologizing for the statistical embarrassment. Change the names and the dates and we have—Presto!—a review of the present volume: an inspired interweave of theory and practice, coupled wth research that will convince no one, but "can do no harm.1"

This collection of original articles, written by psychoanalytically oriented psychologists, had its origins in a panel devoted to the use of the Rorschach in the assessment of borderline states at the 1978 annual meeting of the Society for Personality Assessment. Twenty-one loosely edited papers—all of which cannot be mentioned here—are organized in four sections: overview of theoretical and diagnostic considerations, treatment implications, research, and children and adolescents. Sections one, two, and four can be strongly recommended to the reader; section three can, at best, be regarded as promising, here treated with benign neglect. Mention of several chapters will illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the volume.

Setting a reflective tone for the entire volume, Sugarman and Lerner (Chap