ABSTRACT
The concept of the borderline as a clinical diagnostic category in psychoanalysis has in fact had a long history. As Nestor Braunstein indicates, there is good reason to think it was addressed in Vienna in the 1920s, which would make it not in fact a discovery of recent decades but instead one whose nosology was described at the origins of the field. This earlier dating would make its clinical significance quite different than that which is sometimes proposed. The borderline concept would cease to appear as an aberrant form that calls for alternative modalities of thinking and practice and instead be recognized as a dysfunction of the border to which all subjective structure might be vulnerable—the designation of borderline would then be seen as a matter of degree than a matter of absolute difference.
