ABSTRACT
A characteristic feature of many borderline patients is the curious mixture of anxiety, terror and sexual excitation they deploy in order to confront the sense of persecution and the fear of annihilation. In borderline pathology—the borderline being that between the neuroses and the psychoses—the patient has never succeeded in overcoming the persecutory and annihilation anxieties of earliest infancy; he has not had the help of an object capable of assisting him in this task. The borderline patient, then, is at all times potentially tormented by such anxieties, which he must constantly face. Borderline patients typically exhibit a fluidity of personal identity and in regard to the positions of aggression or submission. This makes them more amenable to change and more receptive to psychoanalytic help than subjects with structured perversions. The mixture of terror and states of sexualization suggests that an excess of persecutory anxieties might be a contributory factor to perversion.
