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The term ‘borderline’ has been used in psychiatry since the beginning of the last century. It was applied to ambiguous pathological conditions, which could not be defined using the traditional diagnostic categories of psychoses and neuroses, and which in many cases could not even be described as pathological. The fact that it could mean both everything and nothing led to the appearance of new terms, like ‘pseudoneurotic schizophrenia’, ‘psychotic character’, ‘as if personality’ - terms that related to one or other of the traditional diagnostic categories. After World War II a new understanding emerged and ultimately prevailed: that all of these hybrid terms belonged to a particular diagnostic category of patients, for which the term ‘borderline personality disorder’ was adopted.
The term ‘borderline personality disorder’ was formulated for the first time at the 1976 World Congress, held in Topeka, Kansas, under the auspices of the Menninger Psychiatric Foundation and the NIMH, and organized by the author of this article in close cooperation with Otto Kernberg. The contribution of the latter was decisive in the recognition of borderline pathology as a particular mental structure, pathological but stable, a borderline organization