Person
Otto F. Kernberg
Austrian-born American psychoanalyst. He combined ego psychology with object relations theory in his work on borderline personality organization and pathological narcissism, and developed transference-focused psychotherapy.
Read more- Born
- 1928
- Influenced by
influenced by
- Ignacio Matte Blanco 1954 Kernberg trained from 1954 at the Chilean Psychoanalytic Society, founded by Matte Blanco, whose openness to several schools gave him grounding in both ego psychology and Kleinian theory, the two strands his own work would later join.
- Heinz Hartmann 1976 Kernberg's "Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis" (1976) joins object relations theory to ego psychology, taking up the self- and object representations that go back to Hartmann's 1950 distinction and Edith Jacobson's development of it.
- Margaret Mahler At the Menninger Foundation Kernberg built on Mahler's account of separation–individuation, using its phases to place the fixation points of borderline and narcissistic pathology in his developmental model.
developed
- Countertransference 1965 Kernberg argued for a broad, "totalistic" view of countertransference as the analyst's whole emotional response to the patient, rather than only the analyst's own unresolved conflicts, and held it to be especially telling with borderline and other severely disturbed patients.
- Splitting 1967 Kernberg made splitting, the active keeping apart of all-good and all-bad images of self and others, the central defence of borderline organization, and tied it to a failure to integrate early object relations.
- Projective identification 1975 Kernberg counted projective identification among the primitive defences of borderline patients, who put into others what they cannot bear in themselves while still feeling it and trying to control the other, and he used it to read their transferences.
introduced
- Borderline personality organization 1967 Kernberg set out borderline personality organization in his 1967 paper as a stable structure between neurosis and psychosis, defined by identity diffusion, primitive defences and preserved reality testing, and expanded it in Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975).
- Structural interview 1981 Kernberg devised the structural interview to diagnose the level of personality organization; he published it as "Structural Interviewing" (1981) and as a chapter of Severe Personality Disorders (1984).
- Transference-focused psychotherapy 1999 With John Clarkin and Frank Yeomans at Cornell, Kernberg turned his psychoanalytic treatment of borderline patients into a manualised method, first published as Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality (1999).