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The psychoanalytic concept of borderline emerged from a combination of clinical experience and theory. Deutsch (1942) wrote of the ‘as if’ personality, and Zetzel (1968) of the ‘so-called good hysteric’, Winnicott (1965) and Laing (1960) of the ‘false self’. All were trying to capture the essence of people who, while not diagnostically psychotic, evince psychotic mechanisms, often regress dangerously within psychoanalytic treatment, and yet prove challenging and sometimes rewarding patients. They exist, as Rey (1994) summarises it, on the borderline between oedipal and pre-oedipal, between psychosis and neurosis, between male and female, between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, between fear of the object and need for the object, between inner and outer, between body and mind.
Perhaps because of its clinical difficulty and variability, borderline personality has evoked intense theorising among psychoanalysts and represents a battlefield upon which many of the controversies and schisms of contemporary psychoanalysis have been played out. Intriguingly, the schisms within psychoanalysis were notably absent from the four presentations given at the Congress although there was an abundant mix of clinical experience and theoretical view. It is doubtful that the lack of controversy represented a move of the different approaches to borderline personality from a position of psychoanalytic disagreement to one of common ground (Wallerstein, 1992). It is more likely that the absence was apparent rather than real, arising as a result of the diverse perspectives taken by each panellist. Akhtar emphasised the process and technique of treatment, Bollas focused on the intrapsychic affective state of the borderline, Kernberg outlined a descriptive/structural classification and its relationship to technical issues derived from psychotherapy, and Resnik explored the link of the borderline with psychotic function.
The first panellist, Salman Akhtar, addressed the evolving psychic