Management Of Countertransference With Borderline Patients

Management of Countertransference with Borderline Patients is an open and detailed discussion of the emotional reactions that clinicians experience when treating borderline patients. This book provides a systematic approach to managing countertransference that legitimizes the therapist's reactions and shows ways to use them therapeutically with the patient.

This book provides a systematic approach to managing countertransference when treating borderline patients. Using detailed accounts of clinical experiences, the authors demonstrate how their own thoughts, feelings, and fantasies enable them to understand their patients' internal worlds.

Treating borderline patients is one of the most challenging areas in psychotherapy because of the patient's extreme emotional expressions, the strain it places on the therapist, and the danger of the patient acting out and harming himself or the therapeutic relationship. Many clinicians consider this patient population difficult, if not impossible, to treat. However, in recent years dedicated experts have focused their clinical and research efforts on the borderline patient and have produced treatments that increase our success in working with borderline patients. Transference-Focused Therapy (TFP) is psychodynamic treatment designed especially for borderline patients. This book provides a concise and comprehensive introduction to TFP that will be useful both to experienced clinicians and also to students of psychotherapy. TFP has its roots in object relations and it emphasizes that the transference is the key to understanding and producing change. The patient's internal world of object representations unfolds and is lived in the transference with the therapist. The therapist listens for and makes use of the relationship that is revealed through words, silence, or, as often occurs in the case of individuals with some borderline personality disorder, acting out in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. This primer offers clinicians a way to understand and then use the transference and countertransference for change in the patient.

This text contains descriptions of how to work with borderline patients.

Published in 1993, Relationship Management of The Borderline Patient is a valuable contribution to the field of Family Therapy.

This volume gives psychodynamic psychotherapists a view of how their colleagues actually treat severely disturbed borderline patients and how treatments proceed over the course of several years.

Borderline conditions are a growing presence in the treatment room, yet they are uncommonly resistant to treatment. Dr. Kernberg and his colleagues have already articulated the modality they call Transference-Focused Psychotherapy. Now, in an unusually textured elaboration, they confront the complications that limit treatability—co-existing psychopathologies, early trauma/dissociation, problems endemic to the therapeutic situation (attachment disturbances, erotic transferences)—and bring new rounds of clinical ammunition to meet those challenges.

In this volume, Dr William Meissner offers a concrete approach to the therapy of borderline patients. For Meissner, the term borderline does not refer to one diagnostic entity, but rather to a series of entities of varying degrees of pathological organization, reflecting a range of structural and functional levels. This shift in viewpoint has crucial implications for clinical treatment. It calls for a variety of psychotherapeutic strategies and a more flexible, more responsive therapeutic schema correlated to the patient's level of pathology.