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Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality: Focusing on Object Relations.

John F. Clarkin, Frank E. Yeomans, Otto F, Kernberg.

American Psychiatric Publishing Inc. 2006.

ISBN: 1585622109

Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality works explicitly from Kernberg’s model of borderline personality organization rather than only the Diagnostic Statistical Manual categorical Borderline Personality Disorder. Key structural features:

• Identity diffusion: fragmented, poorly integrated representations of self and others.

• Primitive defenses: especially splitting, projective identification, idealization/devaluation, and primitive denial.

• Predominantly poorly integrated object relations: unstable, polarized internal dyads of self–other linked by intense affects (e.g., “abused self–sadistic other,” “ideal self–ideal other”).

Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) targets these internalized object relations as the substrate of borderline pathology and conceptualizes change as integration of split, contradictory self–object representations into more coherent, complex, and affectively modulated structures.

John F. Clarkin is a clinical psychologist and Clinical Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. He has served as Co-Director and more recently Director of the Personality Disorders Institute at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital–Weill Cornell, a leading centre for research and treatment of personality pathology.

His work focuses on the phenomenology and classification of personality disorders, and on the development and empirical evaluation of psychotherapies for borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, including transference-focused psychotherapy.

Frank E. Yeomans is a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist specializing in personality disorders. He is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, Director of Training at the Personality Disorders Institute at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital–Weill Cornell, and Adjunct Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Trained at Harvard College, Yale School of Medicine, and in psychiatry at the Payne Whitney Clinic, Yeomans has focused his career on developing, teaching, and researching psychodynamic treatments for personality disorders, especially transference-focused psychotherapy.

Otto F. Kernberg is an Austrian-born American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, internationally recognized for his contributions to object relations theory, the concept of borderline personality organization, and the development of transference-focused psychotherapy.

He trained in medicine and psychiatry in Chile after fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe, later moving to the United States where he became a central figure in contemporary psychoanalysis. Kernberg served as Director of the Personality Disorders Institute at Weill Cornell and as a senior training and supervising analyst at major psychoanalytic institutes, becoming one of the most influential theorists of severe personality disorders.

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