ABSTRACT
This story is to an extent about the limits of therapy and to an extent about the crucial difference therapy can make, especially when it feels like a person’s life is at stake. Much recent psychoanalytic work has focused on working with the borderline personality disorder presentation clinically. This is not always consistent with a psychiatric diagnosis but, more often, it refers to a psychoanalytic understanding of the term. The description of such patients is often negative, as clinically, they test the ability of the therapist to function, and therefore, to be able to help them. What is not as consistently recognised is that BPD is almost always the result of severe trauma in childhood and parental failure to contain the child’s feelings. Therapy on the edge of survival for both the therapist and the patient is at the core of the story below.
