Psychotherapy with the borderline patient: an introduction.

This paper serves as an introduction and orientation to six articles written by renowned experts on psychotherapy with borderline patients: Adler, Meissner, Chessick, Giovacchini, Kernberg, and Stone. Because the articles focus most explicitly on treatment and only touch on diagnosis, a brief excursion into diagnosis is provided. A section on conceptual framework for psychotherapy is presented, helping the reader to place the different authors' approaches into a continuum of exploratory psychotherapy. Finally brief summaries of this six articles are offered.