The Inseparable Nature of Love and Aggression: Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives

This didactic volume advances modern thinking about mental disturbances and their treatments, with psychoanalysis envisioned as one of the basic sciences of the mind. Kernberg develops a modern understanding of psychological therapies, contextualized in classic psychodynamic underpinnings. He puts many subtle dimensions of the mental apparatus in perspective without marginalizing alternative approaches to the therapeutic conversation. He encourages an open engagement with a variety of new approaches that integrate how developmental landscapes and traumatic vicissitudes interweave with various therapies to influence mental health outcomes. This is a clear articulation of the synergistic value of classic conceptions, new scientific perspectives and future inquires in clarifying the power of clinical practice. Kernberg s vision of therapeutic dynamics consolidates lasting lessons from the past with modern perspectives to facilitate maximally effective therapeutic practice along with a new scientific understanding of the underlying mind-brain dynamics. --Jaak Panksepp, Ph.D., Baily Endowed Professor of Animal Well-Being Science Washington State University

Otto Kernberg is one of the most important thinkers in contemporary psychoanalysis. This, his latest volume, collects his recent work on the treatment of severe personality disorders, on sex and love, on psychoanalytic theory, and on the troubles of the psychoanalytic profession. Throughout the book we are treated to the familiar clarity of his thinking and to his skill in moving from theory to practice, and from the experience of practice back to the reformulation of theory. A must for the shelf of every practicing therapist. --Robert Michels, M.D., Walsh McDermott University Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry Cornell University

In this book, Kernberg first distinguishes, then interrelates psychoanalytic, clinical psychiatric, and neurobiological perspectives in a variety of areas, beginning with severe personality disorders and extending to love, destructiveness, mourning, spirituality, and the future of psychoanalytic inquiry. Dr. Kernberg is renowned for his work with borderline and narcissistic patients, and in this book, he offers new approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of the most severe personality disorders, particularly the spectrum of severe narcissistic psychopathology. His effort to relate psychoanalytic to neurobiological findings continues in two fascinating areas -- the study of sexual love and of religious experience -- and he examines object relations theory in relation to these two phenomena.

Kernberg's analysis of love and aggression is both bold and nuanced and will captivate the professional psychotherapist as well as the psychologically astute general reader.