ABSTRACT
In 1953, Robert Knight, Director of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, wrote an article on a new personality. He called these patients "borderline" and by the mid-1960s this had become a most compelling diagnostic term, first in the United States and then in Europe and around the world. As selves looked to their devastated countries, and to their own lives, they were left in unconscious rage against the lost idealized beliefs that had seemed to promise so much. Life in a society required that selves regulate their sexual and aggressive drives by transferring some of that energy to the self's conscience. Sigmund Freud termed this the "superego"; it was a specialized part of the ego that provided the power and authority necessary in order to govern selves in groups. In return for the frustrating loss of uninhibited sexual and aggressive actions, people receive the love and affection of their superego which affords them a different kind of gratification.
