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Freud made even the most severe forms of mental conditions relevant to all, by showing that they point to essential, but warded off realities. When, after Freud's death, the treatment of the borderline conditions became pervasive, his view was supplanted by a perspective which emphasized that the afflicted suffer from a lack in their relationship to central features of reality. Such a view has helped us understand how grave the problems are that these patients face. Yet it presents us with a notion of reality that is as constricted as it is constraining. Bleger's analysis of ambiguity provides a powerful alternative to this view. In the essay his ideas are first introduced through a case presentation. Bleger regards the ego of the borderline patient not as defective, but as different from the ego of the neurotic. According to Bleger borderline patients show attitudes and behaviours that are conventionally taken to be contradictory, but the afflicted themselves experience neither conflict nor confusion. Their experience is shaped by a coexistence of several ego-nuclei, between which the patients continually shift. For Bleger the central mechanism used in these conditions is a Primary identification with diverse objects. Continuing along the lines of his analysis, the essay concludes that the borderline patients are not lacking in reality; on the contrary, they suffer from a reality that is excessively, even disturbingly complex. Moreover, ambiguity is shown to be relevant not only to pathology. It is a salient feature of psychic life that captures an array of experience different both fromsocial reality, as conventionally perceived, and from psychic reality, as conceived by Freud. Thus we all are assailed by dangers not only real or phantasized, but also ambiguous.