Hope

In this detailed examination of the way that borderline patients use hope as a means of preventing change and sustaining omnipotence, Anna Potamianou draws on her many years of clinical experience, as well as myth and literature, to put forward new ways of understanding narcissistic and borderline pathology. Showing how her ideas are linked to the theories of analysts such as Kohut, Kernberg, Winnicott and Green, she discusses what she sees as the two fundamental influences on narcissistic and borderline pathology. The first is the balance between cathexis and countercathexis, which determines the cohesiveness of the patient's identity and also governs the degree of contact with both internal and external reality. The second is the degree of instinctual fusion and diffusion between the life and death instincts, which determines the extent to which the patient's mental function is narcissistic or object related.