The Borderline Syndrome: A Critique and Response to Recent Literature on its Etiology, Dynamics and Treatment

Schwartz-Salant: Our next speaker is Howard Levene. Dr. Levene is a Jungian analyst. He is the Director of Training at the San Francisco Institute of Analytical Psychology, a center of Jungian thought that has greatly contributed to what Jungians know about difficult issues such as we meet in the borderline aspects of psyche. Howard Levene was one of the founders of Diabasis, a treatment center for acute schizophrenics, and he has published papers on the subject of the psychotherapy of acute psychotic patients without the use of drugs, as well as the aftercare of schizophrenia, and the clinical effects of the labelling process. Dr. Levene is dedicated to the process of healing, and we look forward to his insights on issues raised by the borderline patient.

When a Jungian analyst approaches the literature on the psychoanalytic treatment of the borderline patient, he finds himself in somewhat unfamiliar territory. Jungians tend to avoid discussion of analytic technique per se, and even more, to avoid diagnostic labels. Jung wrote:

… experience has taught me to keep away from therapeutic “methods” as much as from diagnoses. The enormous variation

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among individuals and their neuroses has set before me the ideal of approaching each case with a minimum of prior assumptions. The ideal would naturally be to have no assumptions at all. But, this is impossible even if one exercises the most rigorous self criticism for one is oneself the biggest of all one's assumptions, and the one with the gravest consequences. Try as we may to have no assumptions and to use no ready-made methods, the assumption that I myself am will determine my method: as I am, so will I proceed. ( Collected Works, Vol.  16, par.  543)

The problem is compounded for me by the fact that, although I was trained in a traditional psychiatric residency, I have become convinced that the medical model approach to the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders is not only incorrect, but also has destructive con