The term borderline was first coined by Adolph Stern in 1938 to describe a group of patients who did not seem to fit into the primary diagnostic classifications of “neuroses” and “psychoses.”2 These individuals were obviously more ill than neurotic patients—in fact, “too ill for classical psychoanalysis”—yet they did not, like psychotic patients, continually misinterpret the real world. Though, like neurotics, they displayed a wide range of anxiety symptoms, neurotic patients usually had a more solid, consistent sense of identity and used more mature coping mechanisms.
