This book is largely the result of a collaborative examination of analytic case material, over a four-year period, by the members of a learned, more or less homogeneous, albeit uneven in experience, group of analysts, enriched by the careful study of relevant literature and the commentary of three able authors, themselves members of the group.

Whether psychiatric illness is continuous or discontinuous is still an open argument, and it is central to the issue of the borderline concept. Thus, for phenomenological psychiatrists like R. Grinker (who might also call himself a psychoanalyst), nonpsychoanalysts like