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This book serves the psychoanalytic community exceedingly well. It demonstrates the appropriate application of classical psychoanalysis to borderline psychopathology. It also demonstrates the limitations and fallibilities of certain approaches that are based on rigid, unidimensional theories. The authors derived their material from a four-year study conducted by the Kris Study Group of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. The book, however, reflects the selective judgment and originality of the authors, who take full responsibility for its content.
The study focuses especially on a detailed examination of four completed analyses of borderline patients along with a thorough critical review of Kernberg's ideas. Diagnoses are based on current descriptive criteria for borderline personality disorder. The study group spent a day with Dr Kernberg, reviewing two of the cases in detail and discussing various aspects of his theoretical and clinical positions. Dr Kernberg agreed that the two cases meet his diagnostic criteria. The other two cases are quite similar. The four cases are presented in sufficient detail to allow the reader to judge the adequacy of the clinical bases for the authors' arguments and conclusions. The analyses extended from 5 to 10 years and were conducted with little modification of technique. The authors acknowledge that more seriously disturbed borderline patients could not be treated in classically conducted analyses; so they carefully specify that their subject is confined only to psychoanalytic perspectives on borderline patients.
Findings are organized according to topics of object relations, reality testing, defences, transference, technique, and aetiology. Much is consonant with expectations of analysts accustomed to treating borderlines. Some findings, however, are not obvious and will provoke thought. These deserve summary here.
The authors found that the four borderline patients psychologically differed from neurotic patients on