The Search for the Real Self

In the introduction Masterson candidly describes a period in the profession. For years psychiatrists gave the label «borderline» to patients who seemed sicker than neurotic but not psychotic. In Masterson's words this «wastebasket term» described the doctors' ignorance more than the patient's problem. Psychiatrists took it for a form of schizophrenia; classical analysts treated it as an oedipal neurosis and got nowhere. Gradually the view spread that such patients were untreatable.

Masterson then explains how the knot was untied. Combining a follow-up study of hospitalised adolescents with Margaret Mahler's mother–infant observations and object relations theory, Masterson concluded that borderline disorder stems from a developmental arrest of the real self in the pre-oedipal phase. The thesis was presented at a 1975 symposium honouring Mahler. Masterson sums it up as two shifts: from describing symptoms to psychodynamics, and from the oedipal phase to an earlier stage of development.

Chapter I's strength lies in its clinical portraits. Jennifer, a 35-year-old actress, plays a strong-willed woman on a soap opera but in real life clings to one seemingly «reliable», actually cold man after another, demands more love, the man withdraws and the relationship collapses. Pam, who left college with panic attacks, lies in bed escaping into strange fantasies drawn from childhood fairy tales. Martha falls into a cycle of depression and overeating. June, 34, talks about herself in the third person and says «nothing has seemed real» for eighteen years.

Masterson ties these stories into a common pattern: these people look for the problem «out there» — in the right man, the perfect woman, a better boss, the right diet — and cannot see the self-defeating cycle they themselves have built. One of the most striking cases is Beverly, a 56-year-old interior designer: walking down Fifth Avenue, Beverly is suddenly flooded with a sense of total freedom, then panics, runs home and starts eating. After writing a first poem in years on the subway, Beverly tears it up in fear. From this Masterson draws a surprising conclusion: in a culture that worships freedom, many of us are secretly terrified of it.

The theoretical core of the book is the «abandonment depression»: when someone with an impaired real self tries to express themselves independently, they experience fear of abandonment, emptiness and depression. The false self is built to defend against these feelings but costs the person a meaningful life. The idea is powerful and many readers will recognise themselves. Yet the book's weaknesses are visible today: the mother's role in causing borderline disorder is heavily emphasised, genetic and biological factors get little space, and the evidence-based treatments that emerged in later decades, such as dialectical behaviour therapy, are absent.

The Turkish edition appeared in the Psychotherapy Institute's training series. The translation conveys the content accurately, though sentences often follow English syntax and read heavily. As Masterson himself says, the book addresses both lay readers and professionals: the former will get most from the clinical stories, the latter from the therapy chapters.

• Vivid clinical portraits that read like fiction
• Complex psychoanalytic theory explained through everyday examples
• Artists' lives used to show the healing role of creativity