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The previous generation of analysis was symbolized by Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein. Today Giovacchini, Kernberg, and Searles are representative of the current analytic scene. In this we have quite a tale as to where we were and where we are today. Contrast the carefully developed, systematically constructed theory of the ego developed by the former group with the clinically-immersed, highly impressionistic concerns of the present authors and the revolution in psychoanalysis becomes apparent.
There has been a new opening, admittedly in a chaotic way, to realms of therapeutic experience (such as countertransference) hitherto never really considered central. Take countertransference: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone of the house.” No matter what their divergences, each author has centralized the countertransference experience as a major indispensible diagnostic and therapeutic modality of treatment, coordinate in every respect to the attention paid to transference.
This is a small book, the transactions of a professional conference held in New York in 1978 sponsored by the “Masterson Group for the Study and Treatment of the Character Disorders” (shades of the more modest “Kris Study Group”?). The participants presented papers and then discussed each other's presentations. Pressure to condense viewpoints permits certain revealing observations to slip out, as it were. Thus, the quite evident diagnostic confusion endemic in this whole “borderline” concept is highlighted by Giovacchini in the following: “I feel that every patient who has a character defect, in contrast to psychoneurotic patients (and I wonder if they even exist), is borderline. These patients are often hovering on the edge of a psychosis and, in this phenomenological sense, they are borderline” (p. 108). This comment is helpful in orienting one towards the whole body of Giovac-chini's work because it would seem that he attempts analysis with patients considerably more psych