Gerald Adler is a compassionate, thoughtful and dedicated psychoanalyst whose new book reflects the author's two decades of therapeutic experience working with borderline patients. He acknowledges the contributions of his long-time collaborator, Dan Buie, while taking full responsibility for the present exposition of these views.

Adler traces the etiology of borderline pathology to a developmental failure in the formation of stable "soothing-holding introjects" during the phases of separation-individuation in the second and third years of life. These introjects are unstable and subject to a regressive loss of function. Adler claims that his formulations describe a more fundamental failure than that posited by Kernberg who has described the basic defect in borderline pathology as an inability to integrate self- and object representations due to intense conflicts involving ambivalence, especially in regard to oral sadism directed to the frustrating