Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality

John F. Clarkin, PhD
Frank E. Yeomans, MD, PhD
Otto F. Kernberg, MD

 

An elegantly humane yet clinically rigorous approach to interventions within one of the most challenging categories of personality disorders, Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality is an important professional resource for all mental health professionals.

In Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality, the authors describe TFP (transference focused psychotherapy) principles and methods and provide clear guidelines on how to apply them to individual patients on a session-by-session basis. Readers learn techniques for seeing past  the wall of behavioral and cognitive dissonance typically thrown up by the borderline patient and to identify and label a patient's radically conflicting self-conceptions and object representations.  They learn how to immerse themselves in the turbulent currents of the borderline narrative stream, while, at the same time, maintaining the clinical distance required to be a constructive force in their patients' lives.  And they learn how to get patients to relax their defenses, to become active participants in the process of reconciling the warring factions within, and to find the courage to appreciate themselves and others in their full complexity as human beings.

"Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality is an excellent guide to the treatment of these difficult and frequently intractable patients who test the mettle of any psychotherapist who attempts the daunting task of engaging them in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The authors have presented a manual that is practical, lucid, and yet sophisticated."

--Hans H. Strupp, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University

"This admirable guide's many verbatim examples are organized into an expansion of the well-known and impressively effective Kernberg-style psychotherapy treatment system for borderline patients. If you treat borderline patients in psychotherapy, you need this guide for its high-power focus in the special problems of these patients."

--Lester Luborsky, PhD, Dept of Psychiatry, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.