Historical perspectives on the borderline concept: a review and critique.
Considerable confusion and disagreement remains in the psychiatric literature over the meaning of the term borderline. Over the last ten years a veritable explosion of books and articles on the subject have espoused overlapping and at times contradictory ideas on entirely different levels of discourse: biological, genetic, pharmacological, objective-descriptive, ego psychology theory, object relations theory, separation-individuation theory, and so on. Together, they seem both bewildering and irreconcilable. Despite DSM III's efforts to impose conceptual clarity, the situation remains a semantic mess. "Borderline" still means different things to different people and still tends to be a wastebasket diagnosis. No definition has been entirely satisfactory. This article is a preliminary effort at synthesis and explication of how and why psychiatry has arrived at this state of affairs.
D001883:Borderline Personality Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000266:history* / Q000523:psychology; D003674:Defense Mechanisms; D004532:Ego; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009769:Object Attachment; D010554:Personality Disorders / Q000266:history*; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D012569:Schizotypal Personality Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000235:genetics / Q000266:history*; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014481:United States