Management of Countertransference with Borderline Patients

Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., is Bessie Walker Callaway Distinguished Professor of Psychoanalysis and Education in the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry and Mental Health Sciences at The Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. He is also director of the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he is a training and supervising analyst, and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. Sallye M. Wilkinson, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst and Senior Psychologist at the Menninger Clinic. She teaches in the Karl Menninger School for Psychiatry and the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis.

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.