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This volume constitutes the outcome of a research project, sponsored by the IPA's Research Committee, which involved eight psychoanalysts (two from the USA, two from South America, two from France and two from Britain) in a series of discussions on the nature of borderline personality phenomena. The research took place over a three-year period and consisted of a series of weekend meetings in which the participants presented to each other their clinical, theoretical and metapsychological ideas on borderline patients. That the fascinating project was curtailed in its third year for lack of further funding, that its full proceedings are not available to a wider readership is a regrettable fact, which also influences the form of the current book. As it stands, each participant has contributed one or more chapters expressing both their own ideas and theories on borderline phenomena, and also, fruitfully for the reader, outlining their response to the experience of taking part in this unusual international colloquium. Most, but not all analysts presented clinical material, not all of which is included here. We are invited not just to consider the clinical and theoretical perspectives presented by the individual analysts, coming as they do from a wide range of psychoanalytic standpoints, but also to share in their reflections on the reciprocal process of hearing and being exposed to ideas and responses from colleagues whose orientations differed from their own.
André Green, who convened the group, contributes an Introduction, outlining the aims, inspiration and the method devised for this unique piece of research. The group met for two weekends each year over a three-year period to take part in open-minded discussions of borderline patients and the problems of technique, theory and clinical practice. The eight participants were William Grossman and Otto Kernberg (USA); Jaime Lutenberg and Fernando Urribarri (South America); Elizabeth Bott Spillius and