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Edited by Peter Hartocollis, M.D., Ph.D. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1977. 535 pp.
INTENSIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY OF THE BORDERLINE PATIENT. By Richard D. Chessick. New York: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1977. 300 pp.
Two recent books on the "borderline state" offer some interesting contrasts. Borderline Personality Disorders, skillfully edited by Peter Hartocollis, contains the papers from the 1976 Topeka conference. The papers are grouped according to several themes. There are sections on research, on the patient, on the family, on group approaches, and so on. Several points of view on these themes are well represented.
Of particular interest to the psychoanalyst are three clinical papers: M. Furer reports the treatment of a disturbed child with illuminating detail that lets the reader share in the therapeutic struggle; G. Adler presents some marvelous vignettes around the countertransference issues related to the hospitalization of several borderline cases; and O. Kernberg, in the second of two papers, describes some of the therapeutic stalemates on which he has been consulted.
Several discursive papers present both drug and psychotherapeutic interventions as essentially trial and error methods, and there is material in the book on group and family approaches to the management of these problems. Since group and family approaches may offer the best hope at the moment for individuals who lack capacity for autonomous functioning, more studies in this area might have been helpful.
The research section contains reports of several diagnostic studies which are attempting to define some subgroups in this mixed bag of disorders. J. Gunderson and W. Carpenter's paper looks especially promising as a report preliminary to outcome studies. Everyone with an interest in this area is aware of the need for better diagnostic methods which might allow us to compare various treatment approaches. In the same section in this book the paper by R. Grinker,