Transference-Focused Psychotherapy for Adolescents With Severe Personality Disorders (PDF)

Noteworthy themes and features of the text include: Emphasis on the therapist as “third voice,” acting as interpreter and mediator between the adolescent, the parental couple, and conventional society and its values, with the ultimate goal of fostering ego integration sufficient to allow the adolescent to proceed under his own agency. Detailed coverage of the techniques of TFP-A, including creating a holding environment, assuming an active stance, engaging in the interpretive process, analyzing transference and countertransference, achieving technical neutrality, and ensuring interventions are developmentally informed. Practical and accessible review of TFP-A “tactics,” including establishing the treatment frame, collaborating with parents, and other interventions that maintain the conditions necessary for working effectively with the adolescent and for protecting treatment integrity. Thoughtful review of the attributes that make a clinician a good “fit” for transference-focused psychotherapy. For example, therapists must have their own lives “together,” because they will have to use countertransference reactions to identity and understand what is projected onto them. A rich and useful repository of assessment scales and forms in the Appendices, as well as extended and illustrative patient interviews.

Navigating adolescence is fraught under the best of circumstances, but patients with PDs are hampered in their quest for individuation. Transference-Focused Psychotherapy for Adolescents With Severe Personality Disorders fills a critical gap in the treatment literature and is an eminently useful guide for clinicians serving this vulnerable population.