ABSTRACT
Psychic reality, as understood by psychoanalysis, cannot be reduced to either the mental or the physical; the psychoanalytic object is a different object of study, with its own characteristics, categories, and laws. The psychoanalytic models and theories are based on fundamental hypotheses and basic assumptions that have been arrived at through a mixture of clinical experience and self-reflection, speculative intellectual activity and intuition, free-floating attention and deduction, and the attribution of retrospective meaning and abstract representations. The concept of borderline states itself seems to occupy a borderline place between psychiatry and psychoanalysis, both disciplines having different methods and at times, conflicting aims. Critical assessments of psychoanalytic theoretical concepts play a very important part in the development of psychoanalysis; they constantly re-address the clinical as much as the theoretical specificity of this discipline. A number of established opinions have suggested the existence of a direct correlation between the presenting symptoms and specific developmental traumas.
