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This book is an important addition to the literature on borderline disorders, not so much in the problems it solves, for that is not really its purpose, but in the well-written, precise, rigorous manner in which it demarcates the authors' position—the classical, structural, ego-psychological psychoanalytic approach. The authors accomplish this by reporting on four well-analyzed patients who are on the healthier end of the borderline continuum, which enables them to use the power of analytic tools to reach their conclusions.
They unequivocally state that borderline is not a clear diagnostic entity, but is instead a broad category with a range of widely differing symptom constellations and etiologies. Thus, no single, specific prescription for treatment of all borderlines is justified. Unfortunately, by choosing healthier cases to salvage an analytic data base, the authors have sacrificed the opportunity to directly address the major conceptual and treatment dilemmas. They acknowledge this skewing, but they feel that a unique contribution resides in the rich analytic perspective they have been able to obtain. To justify their case selection, they choose a sampling of descriptive borderline features from the classic literature to serve as a guide. They feel that analysis of patients on the less severe end of the borderline spectrum reveals more about it than psychotherapy with more severely ill borderlines, since the difference between patients on the two ends impresses them as more of degree than of kind. Thus, although the analyzed patients they present appear to have severe neurotic character disorders, they extrapolate from their experiences with these healthier patients to the "core" and even the psychotic end of the continuum.
After "Introductory" and "Literature Review" chapters, they present their case material in Chapter III. It is written in a very