ABSTRACT
The borderline concept, as Sugarman and Lerner (1980) have noted, “has a long, uneven and particularly controversial history in both psychiatry and psychoanalysis” (p. 11). The term borderline, as these authors point out,
has been referred to as a “wastebasket” diagnosis for patients who could not be classified as neurotic or psychotic (Knight, 1953), as an “unwanted category” traceable to Bleuler’s (1924) attempts to classify patients whose conventional behavior masked an underlying schizophrenia (Gunderson and Singer, 1975), and more recently as a “star work”—seeming to illuminate a great deal [Pruyser, 1975, p. 11].
