Borderline States: Disorders of the self

Our central theme for the year has been that of borderline states, and the borderline and archetypal levels of the psyche, their occurrence in treatment, and the difficulties emerging in the transference-counter-transference. It would be necessary to write a book to do justice to the papers and discussions and the richness of the clinical material. You will remember we have had papers from Michael Fordham, Lorenzo Bacelle, Geoffrey Brown, Jane Bunster, Patrick Pietroni, Vernon Yorke, Jean Thomson, and Barbara Wharton.

Looking at the issues raised, and the references given, it is clear that we have been strongly influenced by the psychoanalysts who have been referred to as the school of British Object Relations Theory. The authors quoted are Klein, Bion, Meltzer, Winnicott, Bowlby, Rosenfeld, and Balint; and the subjects are: the mirror role of the mother, the experience of omnipotence, container and contained, the prototype of learning, beta-elements and alpha-function, holding, the environmental mother, maternal preoccupation, maternal reverie, unconscious fantasy, and positions, depressive and paranoid-schizoid.

Fordham's deintegrative-reintegrative model uses Jung's concepts of the ego, the archetypes, and the self, picturing the unfolding of the self, the development of an inner world, and the ego. He has made a valuable integration in this model with the concepts of the Kleinians, and it seems possible in time that they might discover that the concepts of a primal self, with an organizing and transcendent function, might be a useful addition to their own theoretical ideas. It is of interest that, during this year, the Children's Section has been studying the Model and its meaning for their work in infant observation and the treatment of children. Papers by James Astor and Elizabeth Urban have enlarged on Michael Fordham's concepts. Do some of these ideas have a relevance to our clinical topic of the year, and point to where pathological developments may be occurr