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In this new handbook, Eve Caligor, Otto Kernberg, and John Clarkin present a detailed exposition of how contemporary object relations theory can be applied systematically in an intensive psychotherapy for patients presenting with the rigidity that characterizes higher-level personality pathology. It is a companion to an earlier handbook (Clarkin, Yeoman, and Kernberg 2006) on transference-focused psychotherapy, or TFP. Both therapies are based on Kernberg's “structural assessment of personality” (1984). Their approach is not “one size fits all” but rather an attempt to develop treatments tailored to specific psychopathology.
In a brief concluding chapter, the authors note the potential value of the handbook as a manual for research, as well as a text for teaching and learning psychotherapy. It incorporates a clearly defined theory of psychotherapeutic technique and therapeutic change. The current volume shares both the advantages and the limitations of a procedural manual.
It is unfortunate that this dual purpose was not stated more clearly at the onset, since the text may be read from either a research or a clinical/teaching perspective. I will focus my comments on the latter frame of reference and leave the research perspective to qualified investigators. However, it is my sense that the research emphasis has lessened the book's clinical richness.
For the clinician, theory and technique flow from the individual patient, and, while the authors discuss patient assessment and differential treatment planning, they do so only in the ninth of twelve chapters, more than two-thirds of the way through the book. In this chapter the clinical examples finally begin to take on some color, as patients are described