Abstract
Otto Kernberg was born in Austria in 1928 and lived there until age ten, when his Jewish parents fled the Nazi regime and immigrated to Chile. In Santiago during the 1950s, he began his academic and professional career, earning his undergraduate, medical, and psychoanalytic degrees. He trained at the Chilean Psychoanalytic Society. Kernberg came to the United States for the first time in 1959 on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study research in psychotherapy with Jerry Frank at Johns Hopkins. Eventually he moved to Topeka, Kansas. He is an alumnus of the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry and a former director of the C. F. Menninger Memorial Hospital. At the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis, he was a Supervising and Training Analyst and Director of the Psychotherapy Research Project of the Menninger Foundation. After the Menninger Foundation experience, in 1973, he became Director of the General Clinical Service of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. In 1972, he was awarded the Heinz Hartmann Award of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society and in 1975, he received the Edward A. Strecker Award from the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital. He married a fellow Chilean, Paulina Fischer (1935–2006) in 1954 (Coates, 2006 ; Pearce, 2006).
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Kernberg, O. (1963). “Discussion of the paper, Object relations theory and the conceptual model of psychoanalysis.” By John D. Sutherland, M. D. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 36, 121–124.
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Kernberg, O. F. (1976). Technical considerations in the treatment of borderline personality organization. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 24, 795–829.
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Supplementary Readings
Bacal, H. A., & Newman, K. M. (1990). Theories of object relations: Bridges to self psychology. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
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Mishne, J. M. (1993). The evolution and application of clinical theory: Perspectives from four psychologies. New York, NY: The Free Press.
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Palombo, J., Koch, B.J., Bendicsen, H.K. (2009). Otto F. Kernberg (1928–). In: Guide to Psychoanalytic Developmental Theories. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-88455-4_10
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