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ARTICLE HISTORY Received 12 March 2022; Accepted 13 March 2022
Freud famously hoped that once brain-research techniques had advanced significantly, neuroscientific concepts would replace his hypothetical constructs and metaphors for the human psyche. In 1914, for example, he stated that “all our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably some day be based on an organic substructure” consisting of “special substances and chemical processes” (Freud, 1914, p. 78). Research on the brain is now sufficiently advanced that such a day may be quickly approaching. Otto Kernberg has greeted that research warmly here, with this thoughtful consideration of the implications of contemporary neuroscience for psychoanalytic theories and treatments.
For at least three reasons, Kernberg is an excellent person to address this question. First, he is temperamentally integrative, as evidenced by the fact that at a time when ego psychology and object relations theories were rigidly polarized, he synthesized them in ways that liberated psychoanalysis from an increasingly stale controversy (e.g., Kernberg, 1976). He has integrated scholarship in personality with literatures on group and organizational psychology (e.g., Kernberg, 1998). And he has persistently urged psychoanalytic institutes to expand their curricula to include material from academic disciplines outside the usual canon (e.g., Kernberg & Michels, 2016). His knowledge of relevant theoretical and empirical literatures is encyclopedic.
Second, Kernberg’s thinking is original, independent, and skeptical of conventional orthodoxies. Despite the resistance of some colleagues to diluting the “pure gold” of “classical” analytic technique, he has developed innovative methods for treating borderline conditions and severe personality disorders (e.g., Caligor et al., 2018; Kernberg, 1975, 1984). He has recurrently critiqued conventional models of analytic training (e.g., Kernberg, 1986, 1996, 2000, 2014). In contrast to analysts who ins