Borderline Personality Disorder: Tailoring the Psychotherapy to the Patient explores the challenge of treating patients with borderline personality disorder. These patients make up a large segment of the difficult-to-treat population. The instability of their relationships, the intensity of their affective responses, and their proneness to paranoid reactions all contribute to their difficulty in working consistently and constructively in the psychotherapeutic situation. When one adds these difficult patient problems to the therapist's quandary about how expressive or supportive to be, therapists are indeed often confronted with a challenging therapeutic task.

The book begins with a review of the clinical and research literature pertaining to the treatment of borderline patients. It presents a unique, empirically based intensive study of three borderline patients, based on transcripts of audiotaped therapy sessions. The research methodology is reviewed, and clinically oriented descriptions of the three patients, their psychotherapy processes, and their outcomes are included. Following an overall summary of results, conclusions regarding the differential indications for supportive versus expressive emphasis in psychotherapy are discussed.

In their research, the authors recorded every psychotherapy session and studied a randomly selected group of sessions. Therefore, the reader is provided with increased insight into what is most effective with what kind of patient at a given point in the therapy process.