The Borderline Personality: Vision and Healing

Rating:
Summary: Deep Visionary Empathy for BPD
Review: From the back cover:

The Borderline Personality: Vision and Healing is an important contribution to understanding not only borderline personality, but basic structures and problems of the human condition. It is imaginative, profound, and clinically sound. Workers of all clinical persuasions will be enriched by Dr. Schwartz-Salant's case discussions and by his determination to follow his vision as far as he can. His courage to say what he sees will help the reader engage more of the experiences, aims and structures adumbrated by the term "borderline." Dr. Schwartz-Salant's explorations enhance and sharpen awareness of possibilities inherent in the therapy relationship in general. --Michael Eigen, Ph.D., author of The Psychotic Core

A highly original blend of the visionary and the practical, Schwartz-Salant's work will appeal to depth psychologists of all schools -- Jungian and Freudian alike. I learnt something from every page, not just about borderline conditions but also about the nature of the psyche and our attempts to attend to its sufferings by means of analysis. --Andrew Samuels, author of Jung and the Post-Jungians

This book offers insights into the inner life of the so-called borderline patient that are unparalleled in the psychoanalytic or Jungian literature. Its grasp of the deep anxieties selfhood poses for the deeply wounded person is thoroughly clinical in its relevance to treatment and yet almost religious in its respect for the soul-struggle of the individual caught in this painful syndrome. Dr. Salant's empathy lifts his work into a class entirely by itself, as the text to which most psychotherapists will turn when they want to understand some of their most difficult patients from the inside. --John E. Beebe, Editor of The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal

In this book, Nathan Schwartz-Salant describes how he applies a Jungian archetypal and imaginal approach to the therapy of borderline clients -- especially to the transference-countertransference field. His work presents a challenge to readers of all schools of psychoanalysis to reflect more clearly and deeply on symbolic issues as they intersect with clinical dynamics. --Sylvia Brinton Perera, author of Descent to the Goddess

Rating:
Summary: This book was my breakthrough in coping with BPD
Review: This book, written by a Jungian therapist, has given me almost all of the words and concepts I have always needed to express the terrible inner darkness, formlessness, and tumult of suffering from BPD. Therapy and meds were a godsend, but they were only palliatives. There seemed no hope of penetrating to the very source of this overwhelming disorder, of understanding it, and perhaps even curing myself of it someday.

Mr. (Dr.?) Schwartz-Salant's compassion, clarity, analysis, and ideas have given me not only hope, but an entirely new (to me) way of looking at the problem, and substantive directions in which to work toward resolution, both on my own and with the few therapists who can/should attempt to work with borderlines.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough, and I hope it helps others as much as it has helped me.