Essential Papers on Borderline Disorders: One Hundred Years at the Border: Michael H. Stone. New York: New York University Press, 1986, 580 pp., $55.00.

Toward the end of his annotated review of the literature in Essential Papers on Borderline Disorders: One Hundred Years at the Border (1986), Stone states,

I am haunted by the dark suspicion that the subject has gotten out of hand. The borderline literature has swollen to a size too vast to be digested by one anthologist. I hope I have made the developments in this field over the past century clearer to the reader than they were before. (p. 432)

Despite the best intentions, the effort to integrate and unify 100 years of discussion and debate on the diffuse diagnosis of borderlines is truly Olympian in its scope.

Stone is an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has written extensively on the borderline patient, including. The Borderline Syndromes (1980). In his writings over the past 15 years, including a 1977 selection in the present volume, Stone has advocated the bio-genetic hypothesis in the etiology of borderline disorders. Much of Stone's research has investigated hereditary links between borderline personality and affective disturbances, particularly bipolar disorder. Given this, it should not be too surprising that many of the readings he has selected, particularly those from the past 10 years, emphasize hereditary aspects of the borderline syndrome.

The volume is divided into four parts arranged chronologically. Possibly to reflect the ever-growing literature, the distribution of readings is heavily skewed toward the past 30 years, with 16 of the 23 works dating from 1953