ABSTRACT
The entity known to members of the medical, psychiatric, and psycho-analytic professions under the usually adequate designation 'borderline patient' or 'borderline psychotic' is in no way familiar to laymen and workers in other fields. It therefore seems possibly illuminating to approach the conference's topic as it usually presents itself to the medically unsophisticated and to work from this to the medical definition. The problems of decision are reactivated as emotional turbulence, and as a cause of, or precipitation from it. On occasions when the turbulence is great enough, it is dramatic, as at birth, death, adolescence, or the onset of senility. Decisions are evolved in the community, family, group and individual; people with a psycho-analytic vertex have committed themselves to thought and discussion.
