Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are among the most challenging patients for clinicians to treat. Their behaviors and emotions can shift abruptly. As a result, these patients can seem like therapeutic moving targets, and improvement can be vexingly slow.

A Developmental Model of Borderline Personality Disorder is a landmark work on this difficult condition. The book emphasizes a developmental approach to BPD based on an in-depth study of inpatients at Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland, during the years 1950 through 1975 and the authors' thirty years of clinical...