Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality

"This book contains the most readable and understandable description of BPD from a dynamic perspective that I have ever read. It is an eye-opener and must reading for anyone working with this population.

This book goes far beyond any other psychodynamic psychotherapy manual that I've read. It not only delves into the relationship and transference, as most do, but gives some straightforward and clear descriptions of very important interventions that are specific to this population.

This book breathes fresh air into psychodynamic psychotherapy. It includes not only a description of the pathology that is understandable even to the non-dynamic therapist, it offers rich descriptions of the specific interventions and their indications that can be effective with the borderline patient." —Larry Beutler, Graduate School of Education, University of California

"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

"In this era of demands for greater accountability in documenting the practice and outcomes of psychotherapy, Clarkin, Yeomans, and Kernberg continue to pursue the challenge of making more transparent what often seems elusive in the treatment of patients with borderline personality disorder. They take seriously the obligation to articulate as plainly as possible the theory behind their work and its translation into 'hands-on' practice." —Paul Pilkonis, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

"This book offers us an opportunity to share in [Drs. Clarkin, Yeomans, and Kernberg's] success. It is a must for anyone who works with borderline patients." —Robert Michels, MD, The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center

"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 on the special problems of these patients." —Lester Luborsky, PhD, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania

Working with a severely reduced emotional palette, the borderline personality inhabits a stark world populated by comic book heroes and villains, victims and destroyers, saints and serpents, endlessly vying for dominance. As any psychotherapist who treats borderline patients knows, entering the fray in an effort to help establish harmony among the warring factions is an undertaking fraught with danger. Even the canniest therapist is at risk of being drawn into the seductive whirlwind of shifting roles and power struggles, only to become another unwitting agent of chaos. What is needed, then, is an approach that provides sufficient clinical structure to contain the destructive forces that can undermine the therapeutic process while remaining flexible enough to allow the therapist the freedom to safely interact with and respond constructively to the roles thrust upon him or her by the patient. This groundbreaking book describes such an approach—transference focused psychotherapy (TFP).

TFP is a sophisticated new variant of psychodynamic interventions centering on the analysis of the transference. Its main goal is to bring a patient's unconscious conflicts to the surface so that they can be actively worked through by the client and therapist within a rigorous clinical framework.

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