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The word borderline has been a particularly conspicuous one in the psychoanalytic lexicon during the last quarter of a century. It has also been a most troublesome word, one that means many different things to so many of us. The fact that it has become a modifier for so many nouns — borderline patients, borderline conditions, borderline states, borderline disorders, borderline organization, borderline personality, as well as borderline group of neuroses — is already an ominous indication of its diverse and idiosyncratic meanings, some of which are mere nuances but some of which presage differences that can be light years apart. Further, when the word is used as a noun, “borderline” could refer to and has referred to anything from a condescending epithet to a diagnostic wastebasket. The embarrassing fact that, as a discipline, we are not even sure what the word really means to all of us, is sufficient reason for our considerable discontent.
Yet for a long time (and since it is alleged to have appeared in the psychoanalytic literature for the first time in 1938 [Stern, 1938],