The borderline - RC - Jan 9th 2012

About Otto Kernberg, MD

Otto F. Kernberg (born 1928) is professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. 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 England) with Kleinian object relations (which was developed primarily in continental Europe 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.

Born in Vienna, Kernberg and his family fled Nazi Germany in 1939, emigrating to Chile. He studied biology and medicine 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. He was the Supervising and Training Analyst of the Topeca Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Director of the Psychotherapy Research Project of Menninger Foundation. In 1973 he moved to New York where he was Director of the General Clinical Service of the New York State Psychiatry 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.

His principle 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 Institute and Society, 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.

The borderline - RC - Jan 9th 2012

I really enjoyed this interview. Dr. Kernberg's explanations were incredibly clear and understandable.

I did find a couple of things confusing. One is the diagnosis of so called "borderline personality" problems. Many of the symptoms that Dr. Kernberg ascribes to these disorders sound like half the people I know! Are things like "all good or all bad" thinking and struggles with intimacy really disorders? Certainly they are characteristics to be worked on in therapy, but how does pathologizing them help?

Another point of confusion for me is this whole idea of these things having a genetic component. I keep hearing conflicting statements about this. I've read that there are studies showing definitively that psychological symptoms do have a genetic component, and that often, these issues are caused by abnormalities in the brain. But then I'll read or hear someone say that there is absolutely no evidence that mental illness has any genetic or biological root; that obviously parts of the brain are involved, but that the brain itself is not the actual cause of such things as clinical depression, panic attacks, etc.

I would love to hear more discussion about these issues since they seem to really be a point of contention in the psych world, and as a lay person and a therapy client, it's hard to know what to believe.