ABSTRACT
Department of Psychiatry, Harvard University Medical School and Psychosocial & Personality Research, McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
1. BACKGROUND
Starting with Stern (1), psychoanalytic therapists made the clinical observations from which the construct of a ‘‘borderline’’ type of personality disorder arose. These observations are still central to current understandings of borderline personality disorder (BPD). They include the phenomenon of testing the tolerance or aptitude of clinicians in terms of governing access, responding to self endangering behaviors and to intense expressions of feelings (towards the therapists in particular), and to their capacity for transient psychotic-like transference.
