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Otto F Kernberg Md Biography & Facts

Otto Friedmann Kernberg (born 10 September 1928) is an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology. In addition, his work has been central in integrating postwar ego psychology (which was primarily developed in the United States and the United Kingdom) with Kleinian and other object relations perspectives (which was developed primarily in the United Kingdom and South America). His integrative writings were central to the development of modern object relations, a school within modern psychoanalysis. Biography Born in Vienna to Jewish parents, Leo Kernberg, and Sonia Paula Friedmann Kernberg, Kernberg was an only child. Kernberg and his family fled Nazi Germany in 1939, emigrating to Chile. He studied biology and medicine at the University of Chile, and afterwards psychiatry and psychoanalysis with the Chilean Psychoanalytic Society. He first came to the U.S. in 1959 on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study research in psychotherapy with Jerome Frank at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 1961 he emigrated to the U.S. joining the C.F. Menninger Memorial Hospital, later became director of the hospital until 1965. He was the Supervising and Training Analyst of the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Director of the Psychotherapy Research Project of Menninger Foundation. During this time, the insight of his colleague Herman van der Waals contributed in raising Kernberg's awareness and interest in narcissistic personalities. In 1973 he moved to New York where he was Director of the General Clinical Service of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. In 1974 he was appointed Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. In 1976 he was appointed as Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University and Director of the Institute for Personality Disorders Institute of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. He was President of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1997 to 2001. He was married to Paulina Kernberg, a child psychiatrist and also a Cornell professor, until her death in 2006. His principal contributions have been in the fields of narcissism, object relations theory and personality disorders. He developed a novel and useful framework for coordinating personality disorders along dimensions of structural organization and severity. He was awarded the 1972 Heinz Hartmann Award of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the 1975 Edward A. Strecker Award from the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, the 1981 George E. Daniels Merit Award of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine. Transference-focused psychotherapy Otto Kernberg designed an intensive form of psychoanalytic psychotherapy known as Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP), which is intended to be suitable for Borderline Personality Organization (BPO) patients. BPO patients are described as experiencing so-called 'splits' in their affect and thinking, and the intended aim of the treatment is focused on the integration of split off parts of self and object representations. TFP entails two to three 45 or 50-minute sessions per week. It views the individual as holding unreconciled and contradictory internalized representations of self and significant others that are affectively charged. The defense against these contradictory internalized object relations is called identity diffusion, and leads to disturbed relationships with others and with self. The distorted perceptions of self, others, and associated affects are the focus of treatment as they emerge in the relationship with the therapist (transference). The consistent interpretation of these distorted perceptions is considered the mechanism of change. Suitable patients Kernberg designed TFP especially for patients with BPO. In his model, these patients suffer from identity diffusion, primitive defense operations and unstable reality testing. Identity diffusion results from pathological object relations and involves contradictory character traits, discontinuity of self and either very idealized or devalued object relations. Defense operations often applied by BPO patients are splitting, denial, projective identification, primitive devaluation / idealization and omnipotence. Reality testing is negatively influenced by the primitive defense mechanisms as they change a person's perception of self and others. Goals of TFP The major goals of TFP are better behavioral control, increased affect regulation, more intimate and gratifying relationships and the ability to pursue life goals. This is believed to be accomplished through the development of integrated representations of self and others, the modification of primitive defensive operations and the resolution of identity diffusion that perpetuate the fragmentation of the patient's internal representational world. To do this, the client's affectively charged internal representations of previous relationships are consistently interpreted as the therapist becomes aware of them in the therapeutic relationship, that is, the transference. Techniques of clarification, confrontation, and interpretation are used within the evolving transference relationship between the patient and the therapist. Treatment procedure Contract The treatment begins with the development of the treatment contract, which consists of general guidelines that apply for all clients and of specific items developed from problem areas of the individual client that could interfere with the therapy progress. The contract also contains therapist responsibilities. The client and the therapist must agree to the content of the treatment contract before the therapy can proceed. Therapeutic process TFP consists of the following three-steps: (a) the diagnostic description of a particular internalized object relation in the transference (b) the diagnostic elaboration of the corresponding self and object representation in the transference, and of their enactment in the transference /countertransference and (c) the integration of the split-off self representations, leading to an integrated sense of self and others which resolves identity diffusion. During the first year of treatment, TFP focuses on a hierarchy of issues: the containment of suicidal and self-destructive behaviors the various ways of destroying the treatments the identification and recapitulation of dominant object relational patterns (from unintegrated and undifferentiated affects and representations of self and others to a more coherent whole). Mechanisms of change In TFP, hypothesized mechanisms of change derive from Kernberg's developmentally based theory of Borderline Personality Organisation, conceptualized in terms .... Discover the Otto F Kernberg Md popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Otto F Kernberg Md books.