I have attempted to present an impressionistic portrait of a borderline patient. Regretfully omitting a thoroughgoing dynamic formulation and report of the treatment, my recapitulation will bear largely on the defective integrative or synthetic process in the aetiology of the borderline.

This patient lived in a fragmented world, the result in large part of inconsistencies in her thinking which affected her language, her time function, her judgement and her reality-testing. These defects seemed to have their genesis in some arrest or early disturbance in the ego's integrative capacity. I believe this defect also affects her psychosexual development, which stopped short of genital primacy, requiring as it does both the subordination and integration of the component instincts to the primacy of the genital zone and the formation of an object of constancy toward whom the sexual aim is directed.