Skip to content
The Jewish Hall of Fame
The collection
Portrait of Otto F. Kernberg

user:Lopezda · CC BY-SA 3.0

Otto F. Kernberg

Austrian psychoanalyst and psychologist

b. 1928age 98Living

A psychoanalyst who gave clinicians a workable theory of narcissism and borderline personality at a time when both were poorly understood, developing transference-focused psychotherapy as a structured treatment rather than open-ended talk therapy. Austrian-born, he built his career at Weill Cornell Medicine, and his writing on personality organization became a standard reference across psychiatry training programs internationally.

Fields

Source and further reading