ABSTRACT
This chapter represents an effort to “come to terms” with the term “borderline”. Cancer patients do not feel cancerous; they may or may not even feel ill. A schizophrenic patient may be neither feeling nor behaving in a “schiz-y” way to be accurately diagnosed; furthermore, diagnostic assessment on that basis might be utterly inaccurate insofar as it does not include recognition of a formal thought disorder. Indeed, one of the earliest and most clinically captivating papers of the borderline literature is Helene Deutsch’s discussion of the “as if” personality, in which she states clearly that these forms of serious emotional disturbance and impoverishment “were not perceived as disturbances by the patient himself”. Andre Green and Harold Searles have, in very different ways, highlighted the use of the countertransference with borderline patients. For S. Freud, the work of the mind required optimal frustration.
