Otto Kernberg: A Contemporary Introduction

The book spans the full scope of Kernberg’s career, both highlighting the diversity of topics on which his writings have shed light and emphasizing conceptual threads that link the different areas of his work. It accessibly follows the experiences that had an impact on the development of his thought and the increasingly strong impact his writing and thinking have had on psychoanalysis and related fields. The authors draw on their decades of working closely with Kernberg to offer a unique insight into his teaching and research, focusing on his work on borderline and narcissistic pathology and the fundamental conceptualization of personality disorders.

Including an overview of Kernberg’s critique and expansion of traditional psychoanalytic training, as well as his role in developing transference-focused psychotherapy, this book is an invaluable guide to students, researchers, and analysts in practice and training looking to integrate Kernberg’s ideas into their own clinical and theoretical work.

Reviews

Just like Otto Kernberg’s work itself, this wonderfully lucid overview of his many contributions to theory, research and practice is simultaneously integrative and wholly original.

—Mark Solms, Co-Chair of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association and Science Director of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Director of Neuropsychology at the Neuroscience Institute of The University of Cape Town

It might not be an exaggeration to refer to Otto Kernberg as a “living legend” in the worlds of psychoanalysis and psychiatry.  Setting out to chronicle his awesome career would be a daunting challenge to anyone, but Yeomans, Diamond, and Caligor have done just that, and they have done it beautifully.  As Kernberg’s collaborators, they know his work well.  With rare clarity, they walk us through the evolution of his thinking and his seminal contributions to our understanding of human behavior.   

—John M Oldham MD, Distinguished Emeritus Professor, Baylor College of Medicine

This collection shows Otto Kernberg as the intellectual and clinical giant he was –the most important and deepest psychoanalytic thinker and innovator from North America but one deeply knowledgeable of psychoanalytic and psychiatric viewpoints across the globe. Kernberg became known for integrating diverse ideas and bringing psychoanalysis into psychiatry in a rigorous way. He did it from a profound grasp of the central tenets of clinical psychoanalysis: Freud’s discovery that patients suffer from unconscious ideas experienced with other persons that create conflicts of ambivalence with which they cannot cope. A “must-read” for every aspiring psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. 

—David Tuckett, Distinguished Fellow and Training Psychoanalyst, British Psychoanalytic Society, Emeritus Professor of Decision-Making at University College London (UCL) and lead author of Knowing What do Psychoanalysts Do and Doing What Psychoanalysts Know. 

Otto Kernberg has arguably contributed more to clinical theory, research, and practice than any other living psychoanalyst. In this invaluable volume, his closest colleagues convey his ideas with the same candid, curious, open-minded attitude that has pervaded Kernberg’s life and work. Although his own writing can be daunting to readers not well versed in psychoanalytic concepts, this lucid explication of Kernberg’s major contributions comes across as accessibly as a well-composed song. It should be read by anyone interested in personality, psychotherapy, psychopathology, sociopolitical and cultural processes, human hatred, and transcendent love – that is, by all of us who care about our world and the people in it.

—Nancy McWilliams, PhD, ABPP, Visiting Professor Emerita, Rutgers Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology