The borderline adult: therapeutic alliance and transference.
The author suggests that successful therapy with borderline patients requires the initiation, strengthening, and maturation of the therapeutic alliance as well as the working-through of the patient's difficulty with separation-individuation from the past. He defines a borderline transference as the activation and alternative projection on the therapist of the patient's primitive, split, positive, and negative object relations part-units. In the process of therapy confrontation and, later, interpretation bring these part-units to the patient's awareness, where they can be worked through and the separation-individuation process failure repaired. The therapist who deals with borderline patients must have both personal maturity and professional skill.
D000328:Adult; D001010:Anxiety, Separation; D005619:Freudian Theory; D006801:Humans; D007207:Individuation; D008297:Male; D009769:Object Attachment; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011385:Projection; D011613:Psychotherapy; D012569:Schizotypal Personality Disorder / Q000628:therapy*; D014167:Transference, Psychology