In this book, Kernberg first distinguishes, then interrelates psychoanalytic, clinical psychiatric, and neurobiological perspectives in a variety of areas, beginning with severe personality disorders and extending to love, destructiveness, mourning, spirituality, and the future of psychoanalytic inquiry. Dr. Kernberg is renowned for his work with borderline and narcissistic patients, and in this book, he offers new approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of the most severe personality disorders, particularly the spectrum of severe narcissistic psychopathology. His effort to relate psychoanalytic to neurobiological findings continues in two fascinating areas--the study of sexual love and of religious experience--and he examines object relations theory in relation to these two phenomena.

Kernberg's analysis of love and aggression is both bold and nuanced and will captivate the professional psychotherapist as well as the psychologically astute general reader.

Otto Kernberg, M.D., is Director of the Personality Disorders Institute, Professor of Psychiatry, and DeWitt Wallace Senior Scholar at the Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, New York, and Training and Supervising Analyst, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Dr. Kernberg formerly served as Director of the C.F. Menninger Memorial Hospital, Supervising and Training Analyst of the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Director of the Psychotherapy Research Project of the Menninger Foundation. The recipient of many awards for excellence in psychiatry and author of numerous books in the field, he is also Past President of the International Psychoanalytical Association.