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Transference-Focused Psychotherapy for Severe Personality Disorders | View Full Calendar

Presented by Frank E. Yeomans, M.D., Ph.D.

3/27/2010

Fee: $75.00

Transference-Focused Psychotherapy for Severe Personality Disorders

The treatment of borderline patients is one of the most challenging areas in mental health. Many clinicians are intimidated by the prospect, are pessimistic about the outcome, and consider stabilization of symptoms without deep change in the personality the best possible outcome. However, an increasing body of clinical experience and research shows that Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) can help these patients achieve character change. TFP is a form of psychodynamic psychotherapy modified to address the borderline condition. It has been developed and is being researched at the Personality Disorders Institute of the Weill College of Medicine at Cornell University under the leadership of Dr. Otto Kernberg.

TFP is an evidence-based therapy that combines the depth of a psychodynamic approach with a structure that facilitates working with BPD patients. It sees the specific symptoms of borderline and other severe personality disorders as manifestations of underlying disturbances in an individual’s psychological structure. From an object relations view, psychological structure is seen as built around images of oneself and important others that have been internalized in the course of development. These images, which are not fully conscious and may contain distortions, play an essential role in how the patient adjusts or fails to adjust to life. They are the lens through which an individual interprets or “reads” what he is experiencing. Exaggerated, distorted, or unrealistic internal images of self and others lead to the problems in mood, self-esteem, and interpersonal relationships that are so prominent in personality disordered patients.

These problems can be modified through psychotherapy. TFP is based on the idea that these patients experience and live out the internal images that make up their psychological structure in the transference dynamics with the therapist as the

treatment unfolds.

Helping the patient get to know the repertoire of self and object images that populate his internal world can help him develop a more integrated, complex and realistic identity that leads to a better adjustment to the world around him. This process of identity integration can lead to the elimination of impulsive behaviors, a decrease in depressive and anxious feelings, and more successful and satisfying experiences in personal relations and work.

This course summarizes the theory and techniques of TFP. It includes an overview of object relations theory and then goes on to describe the strategies, tactics, and techniques used in carrying out the therapy.

Course Objectives

Understand the range of borderline personality pathology
Identify the split psychological structure that underlies borderline personality and ways of achieving an integrated psychological structure
Integrate the strategies, tactics and techniques of effective psychodynamic psychotherapy for borderline personality.

Frank E. Yeomans, M.D., Ph.D., is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Director of Training at the Personality Disorders Institute of Weill-Cornell, Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and Director of the Personality Studies Institute in Manhattan. He graduated from Harvard College and went on to obtain his M.D. from the Yale University School of Medicine and complete his training in psychiatry at the Payne Whitney Clinic of the New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Medical College.

Dr. Yeomans’ primary interests are the development, investigation, teaching, and practice of psychotherapy for personality disorders. He has participated in establishing training programs for psychodynamic therapy of personality disorders in numerous sites in North America and Europe. He has authored and co-authored numerous articles and books, including A Primer on Transference-Focused Psychotherapy for the Borderline Patient, and Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality: Focusing on Object Relations, co-authored with Drs. John Clarkin and Otto Kernberg. He was the head of the team of TFP therapists in the RCT reported on in the article “Evaluating Three Treatments for Borderline Personality Disorder: A Multiwave Study” that appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry in June 2007.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

9am - 12pm CE/CME Credits: 3

New Center for Psychoanalysis

$80 at the door

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