Advances in Psychotherapy of the Borderline Patient. Joseph LeBoit and Attilio Capponi (Eds.). New York:  Jason Aronson, 1979.  viii + 526 pp.

According to its preface, this book aims to go beyond the substantial literature on borderline (and narcissistic) conditions by presenting recent advances in psychoanalytic thinking by prominant analysts from America and abroad. Some of the papers had been presented at a conference under the auspices of the Advanced Institute for Analytic Psychotherapy, with which both editors are affiliated. In addition to the editors, who each wrote an introductory chapter, the contributors were Adler and Buie (on aloneness), Giovacchini (on helplessness), Grotstein (on the borderline concept), Kernberg (on technical considerations), Rey (on schizoid phenomena), Rosenfeld (on treatment difficulties and on transference psychosis), Searles (on countertransference and on jealousy of an internal object), Spotnitz (on technique), and Volkan (on the “glass bubble”). The papers are organized into three sections: the concept, the technique of treatment, and the therapeutic situation.

The book misses its aim. This is less a function of the individual papers than of the absence of an editorial point of view. The contributors earlier and present works are summarized by LeBoit in the first chapter, but without highlighting agreements or disputes, nor clearly presenting the specific advance of the current contribution. Capponi's chapter is a historical review of the borderline concept which is scholarly and has good summaries (especially of the works of Klein, Bion and Kernberg) but achieves only a weak integration. Several of the papers go over much of the same territory as does Capponi, and would have benefited from editing. It also becomes clear that the contributors are frequently discussing patently different patient populations, making their findings lack the comparability implied in the singular of the book's title.

Some of the book's failure is a function of the general state of understanding of borderline and narcissistic conditions. Many phenomena discussed are acknowledged by the vari