ABSTRACT
In exploring ‘the borderline state of mind’, the author argues that by entering this turbulent psychic territory we are confronted not only with the patient’s superego, but most troublingly, our own. We are in terrain that threatens our ability to maintain an analytic stance. Using what he terms ‘benign authority’, the author shows how recovering therapeutic equilibrium requires working through our therapeutically dysfunctional superego. By reinstating this analytic space, we can navigate a course between the ever-present dangers of collusive enactments with the patient’s destructive narcissism on the one hand, or sadistic retaliation, on the other: something the patient unconsciously urges us to fulfil.
