In the 1930’s a psychoanalyst named Adolph Stern created the term borderline to describe patients who appeared to fall between Sigmund Freud’s two main diagnostic categories: psychosis and neurosis. Back at that time, analysts found that such patients would come to their office with what appeared to be neurotic symptoms of anxiety and depression, but as time passed and analysis did not cure these symptoms, psychiatrists began to believe these patients were actually on the psychotic spectrum, or on the borderline between neurosis and psychosis.