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Two decades have passed since Otto Kernberg began publishing his views on borderline patients. He believes they comprise a distinct diagnostic group based on a special type of ego structure and object relations. His use of formulations from the object relation theorists, Melanie Klein, Edith Jacobson, and Margaret Mahler, demonstrated to many in the analytic community the value of a greater familiarity with their formulations and the importance of assimilating these formulations into classical psychoanalysis.
The response to Kernberg's writing was enormously enthusiastic. A flurry of papers, symposia and conferences on the borderline concept followed, and the consideration of treating the severely disturbed patient with analytic methods increased.
Six years ago Abend, Porder, and Willick published Borderline Patients: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, a book based on the proceedings of the Kris Study Group of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute from 1973 to 1977 and an extended meeting with Otto Kernberg. The analyses of four patients who were considered borderline were used as the clinical data for the authors' conclusions.
The conclusions were in disagreement with the views of Kernberg and others on borderline patients. Abend, Porder, and Willick stated that many conceptualizations pertaining to borderline patients were phenomenological descriptions or abstract generalities that could not be confirmed in their data. It was their