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This last book of Paulina Kernberg's, written in collaboration with Bernadette Buhl-Nielsen and Lisa Normandin, about the ‘mirror paradigm’ in clinical practice, confronts us with whom we see when we look in the mirror at different ages of our lives. The book introduces the role of mirrors to convey projectively children's relationships with their mothers and their own sense of self. The ‘Kernberg-Buhl-Nielsen Mirror Interview’ was developed as a short interview that assesses the quality of self-development and object relations, a window particularly into the internal world of adolescents. Written towards the end of a professional life in which Kernberg made substantial clinical and research contributions to child psychiatry and child analysis, hers was the driving passion behind this book, made all the more poignant when one realizes from her daughter's Afterword that Kernberg finished it shortly before her death. This deceptively easy-to-read book could be the definitive one about the use of mirrors in clinical practice. Much of the material is fascinating, evoking ongoing resonances for the reader.
When Paulina Kernberg undertook a study in the early 1990s exploring toddlers’ responses to mirrors, she was Director of Cornell University Medical School child and adolescent psychiatry training program in White Plains, New York. Simultaneously a Training Analyst at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, she brought an analytic perspective to bear on the child's behaviour in front of the mirror as paradigmatic of the mother-child relationship, reflecting the way the child relates to the mother as the first mirror, as well as the child's sense of self-worth. To give an overview of the book's contents: Kernberg describes the role of the mother's mirroring in the development of the infant self and the infant's response to mirrors (the mirror as mother), basing this on analytic theory and empirical studies of maternal mirroring and infants’ use of mi