Essential Papers on Borderline Disorders: One Hundered Years at the Border: Edited by Michael H. Stone. New York: N.Y. Univ. Press, 1986, 580 pp., $55.00 (hardcover), $25.00 (paperback).

This book is one of a series of Essential Papers in psychoanalysis which has included volumes on depression, narcissism, psychoses, and object relations. In each instance, it was no easy task for the editor to select

the most essential papers written about the topic. This is especially true for the current volume. Stone was faced with the task of discriminating among a vast number of papers, many of which have appeared in the psychoanalytic literature over the past 20 years stimulated by O. F. Kernberg's pioneering effort to apply psychoanalytic theories of development and psychopathology to this important group of disorders. The editor's task was even more difficult because the borderline group of illnesses has proved to be rather heterogeneous, necessitating choices from a number of different psychoanalytic points of view. Stone has added to his own burden of selection by deciding, correctly, to include contributions from the field of general psychiatry with which he believes psychoanalysts ought to be acquainted.

The result is an excellent volume which should be in the library of any clinician interested in current thinking as well as the evolution of the concept of the borderline group of disorders. What makes this book truly worthwhile is not so much the papers themselves, but Stone's illuminating, comprehensive, and comprehensible overview, which constitutes over fifty pages in itself. In similar anthologies one often finds a brief introduction to each paper, but in this volume the editor provides us with an extraordinarily perceptive narrative account of the still changing nature of the concept of borderline conditions.

Stone introduces each of the chronological sections with an account of the major themes to emerge during the two decades or so which are covered. He is particularly well qualified for this task because he is equally at home with the literature from the fields of general psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

In the first section, which covers t