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PRIOR TO PERHAPS TWENTY years ago, most of those psychoanalysts whose dominant theoretical orientation was that of ego psychology and the structural theory held that near-classical psychoanalysis should be used solely in the therapy of neurotics and that individuals whose personality structure lay nearer the psychotic end of the continuum of psychopathological states were best treated by other means. Subsequently, in the United States, psychoanalysis with relatively few parameters (Eissler, 1953) has come to be used more commonly in the treatment of people who are afflicted with at least the less primitive varieties of those conditions that have come to be subsumed under the rubric, borderline personality (Meissner, 1984). It is the thesis of this contribution that a major reason for this change is to be found in the infusion into the thinking of the ego psychologists of portions of the thinking of the so-called British schools of psychoanalysis concerning the development of object relations and a resultant better understanding of transference-countertransference phenomena. My conclusion was reached impressionistically rather than through a systematic literature review.
In my opinion, Kernberg, who migrated to the United States from Chile, has been the person most influential in two significant