Resonance of Suffering

Contributors: Andre Green, William I. Grossman, Otto F. Kernberg, Gregorio Kohon, Jaime M. Lutenberg, Jean-Claude Rolland, Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Fernando Urribarri'This book is the result of Andre Green's initiative in getting together a stellar group of eight analysts from four key regions (France, England, the USA and Latin America), which met for six sessions in Paris over a three-year period in order to study Borderline Personality Disorders. Although Green wanted the group to focus on the issue of countertransference - undoubtedly because of these patient's impairment in the capacity to symbolize early traumata - it soon became apparent that the group needed to broaden the topic to the entire field of non-neurotic disorders including diagnostic, dynamic, theoretical and technical approaches. The discussions and detailed clinical presentations reveal the cutting edge of the thinking of very experienced clinicians on the topic. Six of the eight participants wrote a chapter including a detailed clinical vignette and a summary of their sense of the discussions. The chapters are very frank and reveal many areas of agreement in addition to major disagreements about the technical management of these patients, ranging from the frankly psychotic to rather severe neurotics and character disorder. The search for a common language, and agreement on definitions of terms and modalities of treatment, illuminate the wide gaps in understanding between different analytic communities and the process by which these differences may be engaged in a non polemic manner. This allows the reader an unusual degree of participation in the struggles of the group to reach consensus on complicated issues of tactics and strategy. The book will be useful to both students and experienced practitioners.- Francis D. Baudry