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Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Personality Disorders: An Interview with Otto Kernberg, MD
by Otto Kernberg
In this remarkable video, legendary psychoanalyst Dr. Otto Kernberg manages to distill the essential concepts of his lifetime’s work with personality disorders into a single interview.
Working with severe personality disorders is perhaps the most challenging task clinicians face. And while the psychoanalytic literature offers profound insights on this topic, it also can be quite daunting to many therapists.
In this interview, Kernberg first lays out the core principle of Object Relations theory, and his concept of the “borderline personality organization,” characterized by identity diffusion, that underlies severe personality disorders. He walks viewers through the Structured Interview for Personality Organization, giving therapists the opportunity to learn a highly effective and pragmatic way to begin treatment by assessing whether patients suffer from an underlying personality disorder. Kernberg goes on to describe his detailed, manualized, psychoanalytic treatment protocol, explaining the four core treatment techniques: interpretation, transference analysis, technical neutrality, and counter-transference analysis.
Weaving in examples of his own challenging cases, such as an enraged patient who brought in scissors to session and cut up all of his plants, Kernberg serves as a guide for therapists who want support in understanding and managing the dynamics of the oftentimes difficult therapeutic relationship with severely disturbed patients. He discusses how to set limits with chronically suicidal patients, how to work with aggression and violence, how to deal with countertransference reactions, and the essentiality of collegial support.
What therapists are saying…
What makes this video an exemplary teaching tool is the way in which the interviewer, Dr. Terrence Owens, directs Dr. Kernberg, thus enabling the viewer to understand the foundations upon which Kernberg’s thinking is based. Kernberg provides a number of interesting surprises in this video, including an explanation of his use of Erikson’s theory of identity development, and clinical vignettes from his own experiences. I would highly recommend this video for graduate students as well as for experienced clinicians.
-- Mary Lamia, PhD, Professor, The Wright Institute
-- Mary Lamia, PhD, Professor, The Wright Institute
This interview offers much more than a discussion of the theoretical foundations of an object relations approach to therapy. By watching this video, you will have the experience of learning concrete tools and techniques from the leading expert on personality disorders that you can begin utilizing with your most difficult patients immediately. One thing that Kernberg conveys very effectively is the lack of a coherent identity that is at the core of a severe personality disorder. This is dramatically illustrated by his description of one such patient on the video. He reports asking the patient to describe herself and she responds:
"Well, that depends with whom I am. I'm different. And there's always something underneath," she said. She said, "Sometimes I feel like an onion, you know?” “What do you mean?” “You can peel it, and there's a deeper wave, the real onion comes out, and then you continue peeling and there's another onion, and at the end you have nothing." And the patient looked kind of slightly ironic and sad at the same time.
"Well, that depends with whom I am. I'm different. And there's always something underneath," she said. She said, "Sometimes I feel like an onion, you know?” “What do you mean?” “You can peel it, and there's a deeper wave, the real onion comes out, and then you continue peeling and there's another onion, and at the end you have nothing." And the patient looked kind of slightly ironic and sad at the same time.
Length of video: 1:34:00
English subtitles available
Individual ISBN-10 #: 1-60124-237-9
Group ISBN-10 #: 1-60124-238-7
Group ISBN-13 #: 978-1-60124-238-9
Otto Kernberg, MD is the Director of the Personality Disorder Institute at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Westchester Division, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Joan and Sandford I. Weill Medical College and Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Cornell University. He is also Training and Supervising Analyst of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is the Past-President of the International Psychoanalytic Association. He has received numerous awards for his excellence in Psychiatry and has authored or coauthored over twenty books.See all Otto Kernberg videos.
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