Professor Otto Kernberg

Otto Kernberg is a psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. 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 post war 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 theory of mind that is perhaps the theory most widely accepted among modern psychoanalysts.

Otto Kernberg designed an intensive form of psychoanalytic psychotherapy known as Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP), which is meant to be more suitable for Borderline Personality Organisation (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. His many publications include the books Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (2000), and Aggressivity, Narcissism, and Self-Destructiveness in the Psychoterapeutic Relationship: New Developments in the Psychopathology and Psychotherapy of Severe Personality Disorders (2004).