Peter L. Giovacchini

Dr. Rinsley's years of experience treating seriously disturbed children, adolescents, adults, and their families led him to understand the major personality pathology that lies midway along a developmental-diagnostic continuum between the psychoses and the psychoneuroses. Dr. Rinsley clearly delineates the borderline and other self disorders from a developmental viewpoint and suggests viable approaches to psychotherapy with these difficult, often elusive patients. He synthesizes of the work of Klein and Fairbairn from the British school of object relations, Jacobson and Kernberg on internalized object relations, Mahler on symbiosis and individuation, Bowlby on attachment and loss, Kohut on the psychology of narcissism and disorders of the self, Masterson on borderline object relations and the concept of abandonment depression, and Piaget on the development of cognitive-perceptual structure. The author places particular importance on the failure of communicative matching, mutual cueing or "goodness of fit" between mother and child, leading to the latter's disturbances. He shows that the basic therapeutic task is to provide the patient with a "good enough" or "holding" environment within the context of which explanation, confrontation, and interpretation may lead to the resolution of underlying pathologic determinants.

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A Clinician's Guide to Reading Freud

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