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.
This is a stimulating collection of papers on the borderline personality. Many avenues are explored and each paper makes an original contribution to the complex theoretical and clinical problems which are thrown up while working with such patients. Given the wide-ranging discussions, I think it would be distorting to pick out the specific conclusions of any one paper. I will therefore list the authors and their titles, which will give some indication of the ground covered, and then make some general comments:
Schwartz-Salant: ‘Before the creation; the unconscious couple in borderline states of mind’; Charlton: ‘Lines and shadows: fiction from the borderline’, Kacirek; ‘Subject-object differentiation in the analysis of borderline cases: the great mother, the self, and others’; Beebe: ‘Primary ambivalence toward the self: its nature and treatment’; Dieckmann: ‘Formation of and dealing with symbols in borderline patients’; Kast: ‘Transference and countertransference mirrored in personal fantasies and related fairy tale motifs in the therapy of a patient with a borderline structure’; Samuels: ‘Gender and the borderline’; Perera: ‘Ritual integration of aggression in psychotherapy’.
The theoretical discussion in most of the papers, while being firmly rooted in Jung's metapsychology, includes a consideration of psychoanalytic authors and concepts. The Jungian self, self feelings and the term as it is used in psychoanalysis is a recurring theme and the authors elucidate their personal stance in relation to such perennial issues as developmental/interactional; object relations projection and introjection/archetypal imaginal fields; transference countertransference/patient-analyst dialectic; projective identification/participation mystique.
The papers have a mainly clinical focus, and the authors give some vivid illustrations of the challenges presented by their patients, how they were met and the variety of factors which enabled a therapeutic breakthrough leading to a new poten