Otto F. Kernberg

Furthermore, his developmental model includes Kernberg's view about drives, in which he differs from Freud. Kernberg was obviously inspired by Melanie Klein, whose model draws mainly on the paranoid-schizoid position and on the depressive position. More elaborate information on Kernberg's ideas can be found in a recent publication by Cohen M. (2000).

In 1973 he moved to New York where he was Director of the General Clinical Service of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. In 1974 he was appointed Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. In 1976 he was appointed as Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University and Director of the Institute for Personality Disorders Institute of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. He was President of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1997 to 2001. He was married to Paulina Kernberg, a child psychiatrist and also a Cornell professor, until her death in 2006.

His principal contributions have been in the fields of narcissism, object relations theory and personality disorders. He developed a novel and useful framework for coordinating personality disorders along dimensions of structural organization and severity. He was awarded the 1972 Heinz Hartmann Award of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the 1975 Edward A. Strecker Award from the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, the 1981 George E. Daniels Merit Award of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine.

Born in Vienna, Kernberg and his family fled Nazi Germany in 1939, emigrating to Chile. He studied biology and medicine and afterwards psychiatry and psychoanalysis with the Chilean Psychoanalytic Society. He first came to the U.S. in 1959 on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study research in psychotherapy with Jerome Frank at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 1961 he emigrated to the U.S. joining the C.F. Menninger Memorial Hospital, later became director of the hospital until 1965. He was the Supervising and Training Analyst of the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Director of the Psychotherapy Research Project of Menninger Foundation. During this time, the insight of his colleague Herman van der Waals contributed in raising Kernberg's awareness and interest in narcissistic personalities.

Otto Friedmann Kernberg (born 10 September 1928) is an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology. In addition, his work has been central in integrating postwar ego psychology (which was primarily developed in the United States and the United Kingdom) with Kleinian and other object relations perspectives (which was developed primarily in the United Kingdom and South America). His integrative writings were central to the development of modern object relations, a theory of mind that is perhaps the theory most widely accepted among modern psychoanalysts.