You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this book the psychoanalyst and clinical director Heinz Weiss deals with borderline disorders from a Kleinian viewpoint inclusive of concepts such as mentalization theory. As John Steiner makes clear in his foreword, the complexity of its subject-matter is immediately apparent in its terminology, and thus borderline mechanisms, borderline experiences, borderline phenomena and borderline structures are not always easy to distinguish from each other.
The concept of ‘borderline’ as it appears in the title and in a number of other places in this book is always somewhat loosely employed. Some of the patients presented in the very interesting case vignettes can hardly be termed ‘borderline patients’, and in some cases they are relatively successful academics. These patients are more likely to suffer from severe neuroses or to exhibit elements of structural disorder that could lead to greater problems in therapy. In some cases it might have been more appropriate to speak of ‘narcissistic’ disorders or ‘disorders of the self’. In other patients described by Weiss borderline disorders amount to severe distortions verging on psychoses.
None of this, however, diminishes the value of this book. Weiss convincingly suggests how work can be done where specific forms of resistance and negative therapeutic reaction occur. He demonstrates how these phenomena, in many cases with fears of dependence, lingering resentment and strong feelings of shame difficult to interpret, can be understood without causing further shame or involving the concept of destruction of inner space and how appropriate interpretation is possible in these transferences.
This book thus constitutes an outstanding and practical introduction to major developments in Neo-Kleinian theory over the past few years. Concepts such as ‘containment’ (Bion), ‘enactment’ (Jacobs), ‘psychic retreats’ (Steiner) and ‘expulsion of good objects’ (Brenman) in particular are presented with reference to clinical cases. Weiss strikingl