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The author compared 14 child and adolescent borderline patients, diagnosed by the criteria of Gunderson and Singer (1), with a control population for history of separation from the mother or significant caretaker before age 10. The borderline patients experienced a statistically greater number of separations than the psychotic controls, the nonpsychotic psychiatric controls, and the nonpsychiatrically-referred delinquent controls before age 5 but not between ages 5 and 10. The author concludes that the study provides statistical support for the theoretic role of disruption of the early infant-mother bond in borderline pathology.
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Susan J. Bradley (1979) studied this question.
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