Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality: Focusing on Object Relations

From our regular book review column.

This book, an update of the authors’ 1999 work withthe same name, is a superb treatise on a specific approach tothe patient with borderline personality disorder (BPD)—"transference-focused psychotherapy" (TFP). The stated focuson object relations may be considered misleading unless one realizesthat, in TFP, there is only one object, the therapist, andeverything follows from that transference perspective (viawhich are recapitulated all those key early object relationships).The authors, all well-known, prominent experts in the field,have done a remarkably balanced job in presenting not onlytheir viewpoint but other theories and approaches to BPD aswell.