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This book is an account of Schwartz-Salant's work with borderline patients, his understanding of the borderline, and the use of imagination in the healing process. The borderline person is described as someone for whom ‘loss of union is the critical issue. Whatever union experiences with the numinosum there may have been especially during the first months of life, and whatever experiences of union in later developmental stages may have taken place, the borderline person has not been able to sufficiently own or incarnate them’. Schwartz-Salant also stresses that ‘the borderline person has split off and denied imaginal perceptions—the imagination becomes either unavailable or persecutory.’ An understanding of the phenomenology of the borderline personality, Schwartz-Salant argues, cannot be attempted solely in terms of psychotic and/or neurotic mechanisms, but requires a model of its own which is able to encompass and describe the unique identity of the borderline.
The borderline condition is compared to what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls a liminal state, an atemporal realm between social reality or everday consciousness and what are normally repressed components of the unconscious. However, the difference between the borderline condition and the liminal state is that it is not part of a ritual process. This means not only that the experiences gained in this state cannot be carried over or reintegrated into everyday consciousness, but also that it lacks symbolic valency, or, in Jungian terms, there is no transcendent function operating as a bridge between conscious and unconscious. In this respect, the borderline condition can be thought of as a purposive attempt on the part of the individual psyche to create or establish a ritual process that has been missing or insufficient in some way. Schwartz-Salant writes:
We might describe the borderline person who is suspended in a liminal transition, a condition Turner describes as liminoid, with the result that a ‘gro