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Diana Diamond PhD

Psychologist ♦ Psychoanalyst ♦ Professor ♦ Author

  • Diana Diamond Bio
    • Curriculum Vitae
  • Books
    • Treating Pathological Narcissism with TFP
    • Attachment and Sexuality
    • Borderline Patients: Extending the Limits of Treatability
    • Cinematic Reflections on the Legacy of the Holocaust
  • Treatment
  • Narcissism
  • Attachment
  • Gender & Sexuality
  • Film Studies

Treatment (Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis)

Confronts the complications that limit treatability and bring new rounds of clinical ammunition to meet those challenges.
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In her private practice, Dr. Diamond conducts psychotherapy and psychoanalysis with adults, adolescents, and couples both in person and through teleconference. Diamond treats patients with symptoms of anxiety and depression and at varying levels of personality organization, from high functioning to borderline. Her therapeutic work is based on a psychodynamic object relations approach that combines psychoanalytic theory, attachment theory, and affective neuroscience. The major focus of this form of therapy is on identifying and modulating the maladaptive perceptions of self and others and the extreme feelings linked to them as they are experienced in the relationship with the therapist. From an object relations perspective, it is the underlying distorted mental representations that often fuel the difficulties with self-esteem and emotion regulation, symptoms of anxiety and depression, the internal distress and conflict, and the difficulties with intimacy and/or unsatisfying relationships that bring individuals to treatment. The difficulties with self and interpersonal functioning that patients bring to treatment may be relatively mild to more severe, and the treatment approach is modified accordingly. 

Personality Disorders:  Borderline and Narcissistic Disorders

For the past 30 years, Dr. Diamond has worked to advance the theory, research, and treatment of personality disorders with a particular emphasis on narcissistic and borderline disorders. Along with her colleagues at the Personality Disorders Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College, Dr. Diamond has helped to develop Transference Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) for borderline and narcissistic disorders (TFP-N) (see the website of the International Society for Transference Focused Psychotherapy www.istfp.org). The goal of TFP is to identify the internal self and object representations that organize the person’s experience of themself and others. By exploring these relational patterns as they emerge in the therapeutic relationship, the patient learns to identify, reflect on, and modify their often distorted working models of self and their often dysregulating affects, which underlie their symptoms and difficulties with identity, lack of goal direction, and turbulent and/or unsatisfying relationships.  These affectively charged perceptions of self and others, which may be expressed in the patient’s interactions with the therapist or in descriptions of current interpersonal relationships, are the focus of therapy.  Over time, as the extreme affects are tempered and polarized representations of self and others are gradually modified and integrated, experiences of self and others coalesce, leading to identity integration and greater capacity for love and work.

Dr. Diamond currently teaches, lectures, and supervises both TFP and TFP-N internationally, and has participated in establishing training programs in several sites in North America (New York, Los Angeles and Boston) and in Europe (The Psychiatric Institute, London and University of Milan, Italy). As a result of these training programs, several independent TFP centers have been established, with a direct impact on public health policy.  For example, TFP is now recognized as an evidence-based treatment in the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K. In addition to her teaching and supervision, Dr. Diamond has authored or co-authored numerous articles (over 40 peer-reviewed papers and 30 book chapters) on the theory, research, and treatment of patients with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. 

Publications & Teaching

Books:

Koenigsberg, H., Kernberg, O., Appelbaum, A., Stone, M., Yeomans, F. & Diamond, D. (2000). Borderline Patients: Extending the Limits of Treatability. New York: Basic Books.

Book Chapters:

Yeomans F.E. & Diamond, D. (2010). Treatment of cluster B disorders: TFP and BPD. In J.F. Clarkin, P. Fonagy, & G.O. Gabbard (Eds), Psychodynamic psychotherapy for personality disorders: A clinical handbook (pp. 209-239). Washington DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Papers and Books in Progress or Submitted:

Levy, K. N., Diamond, D.,Clarkin, J. F., Kernberg, O. F. Changes in attachment, reflective function, and object representation in Transference Focused Psychotherapy for borderline personality disorder. Submitted for publication.

Yeomans, F., Diamond, D., & Caligor E.  Otto Kernberg: Moving Psychoanalysis Forward to be part of the series Routledge Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis. In preparation.

Diamond, D., Buchheim, A., D. Keefe, J.R. (2021).  Changes in Object Relations and Attachment in TFP: Empirical findings and clinical relevance.  In preparation for a special section of the American Journal of Psychotherapy in honor of Otto Kernberg, M.D.

Yeomans, F. Diamond, D. Caligor, E. & Keefe, J.  The Teaching and Supervision of Psychoanalytic Treatment for Personality Pathology.  In preparation for a special section of the American Journal of Psychotherapy in honor of Otto Kernberg, M.D.

Courses:

Graduate courses in the doctoral program for clinical psychology at the City University of New York (CUNY)

  • Adult Psychopathology I: Theory, Research and Treatment (Object relations perspectives on personality disorders (e.g. Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, Obsessive-Compulsive, Schizoid, Schizoptypal and Dissociative personality disorders) (designed and taught course 1993-2012).

Weill Cornell Medical College:

  • Advanced Psychotherapy Seminar (1990-1993)
  • Seminar in Transference Focused Psychotherapy (2010-Present)

New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

  • Clinical Treatment of Specific Disorders: An Object Relations Approach to Personality Disorders II: Narcissistic Disorders & The Use of Transference Focused Psychotherapy(2015-Present)

New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI)

  • Transference Focused Psychotherapy for borderline and narcissistic disorders (Part of regular curriculum for psychoanalytic candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and psychotherapy trainees (Spring 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022)

William Alanson White Institute

  • Transference Focused Psychotherapy for Personality Disorders (Borderline and Narcissistic) (2022)

© 2021–2023 Diana Diamond, Ph.D.   ·    Email   ·    212-877-2232

Office in The Langham   |   135 Central Park West, 1N   |   New York, NY 10023