Management of Countertransference with Borderline Patients

Reviews / Votes

There have been many fine books on the borderline personality, but this is the first work that intelligently addresses the effect of borderline patients on the psychotherapist or psychoanalyst who works with them. It is a profoundly informative, vivid, and compelling read, because the authors have skillfully inserted riveting clinical vignettes that evoke the presence of the personality they address, thereby establishing a rather remarkable triangular drama: this extraordinary patient, contemporary psychoanalytic theories on the borderline patient, and the clinician who must carry his patient and his own beset-upon self to psychic change and well-being. -- Christopher Bollas, PhD, author of "China on the Mind" Gabbard and Wilkinson have written a book of such lucidity, clinical soundness, and highly readable scholarliness that it deserves to become a standard and enduring textbook for anyone involved in doing individual psychotherapy with borderline patients. The variety of individual therapy that they portray is psychoanalytic therapy, but the lucidity with which they write is such that the reader need not be a psychoanalyst, nor a candidate in an analytic institute, to make good use of their teaching. Furthermore, practitioners of even many years of experience in this field will find, here, illumination and enrichment. I personally have learned much from reading this book. -- Harold F. Searles, M.D. Management of Countertransference with Borderline Patients is a masterful work. Gabbard and Wilkinson write with elegant simplicity and yet with great clinical and theoretical sophistication, bringing to bear the most advanced conceptions of primitive mental processes and intersubjective phenomena. It is a rare event indeed to find clinical accounts of the richness of those included in this volume. Gabbard and Wilkinson present the details of their moment-to-moment experience with the patient and their methods of attempting to make sense of their own thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and sensations in the service of developing an understanding of the internal world of the patient. This book is a major contribution to the development of our understanding of the treatment of borderline patients. It will be of great interest to all clinicians working with borderline patients, whether the therapist is a beginning student or an experienced practitioner. -- Thomas H. Ogden, M.D.