Otto F. Kernberg

Otto F. Kernberg, born (September 10, 1928) in Vienna. In 1939 his family left Germany to escape the Nazi regime and emigrated to Chile where he later studied biology and medicine and afterwards psychiatry and psychoanalysis with the Chilean Psychoanalytic Society. He first went 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 US and joined, and later became director of, the C.F. Menninger Memorial Hospital. He was the Supervising and Training Analyst of the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Director of the Psychotherapy Research Project of the Menninger Foundation. In 1973 he moved to New York where he was Directory of the General Clinical Service of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and in 1974 was appointed Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. In 1976 he was appointed as Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University and Director of the Institute for Personality Disorders Institute of the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. where he leads a large, multi-year grant that compares cognitive-behavioral therapy, supportive psychotherapy, and transference-based therapy. He remains a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College (among his protegees, the controversial Sonia Kulchyckcy), and a Supervising and Training Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

He has written widely and spoken in almost every country that has a significant psychoanalytic presence, but his main theoretical contributions have been in the fields of narcissism, object relations and personality disorders. He has been especially active in the debate over whether the term borderline refers to a personality disorder or is the description of a level of personality organization. He was also instrumental in the integration of the work of Melanie Klein into mainstream American theory.

He was awarded the 1972 Heinz Hartmann Award of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society, 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. In 1995, he became President of the International Psychoanalytic Association. He is married to Paulina Kernberg, a prominent child psychoanalyst who works at Cornell and at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center.