Comment

A symposium on borderline states from a group of London analysts, whose thinking for the most part clusters around the ‘model’ here offered by Michael Fordham, is a very welcome event for an American analyst: it gives us ‘over here’ an opportunity to see how you work ‘there’ and to discover with relief that you have our problems, and that you too are still trying to find out ‘where they really come from’.

I am particularly grateful for this latest communication from Michael Fordham on these issues. His is a generous paper in more than one sense, including the room it leaves for others to fill in what is still far from finished, and the invitation it gives to all of us to walk freely about on theoretical grounds within British Object Relations that might seem by now to belong to the National Trust. (I am thinking particularly of his pointing out that, even though the concept of position is invaluable, the depressive and paranoid/schizoid positions do not come towards us so neatly differentiated in analytic work.) Certainly I respect his humility in being able to present an achievement of many decades as just a theoretical work in progress, with which, unlike Jung's Bollingen tower, we can never expect to hear the architect pronounce himself satisfied.

I have experienced a complementary generosity in the other authors' contributions, which allow us to see not only how they really work with patients, but also how they really think; so that, in outlining the symposium for myself, I typed out ten pages of ideas, keeping track of a rich harvest of issues and languages and suggestions for further reading. The discussions raise, and raise well, all the major issues: boundaries, abandonment, sexual abuse, good and evil eyes, adoption, the dissociation of psychotic and non-psychotic experience, autistic barriers, ‘skin’, containment, and empathy. Yet this is not a smorgasbord, but a true symposium, and so the papers do seem to me to revolve about what I take to be a central poi