Otto Kernberg
When we began doing research for this issue of
What Is
Enlightenment? eight months ago, exploring as many different spiritual and
psychological approaches to understanding the ego as we could get our hands
on, a contemporary psychoanalytic philosophy of ego development known as "object
relations theory" captured our attention. We were fascinated to discover
that many leading thinkers at the interface of psychology and spirituality,
including A. H. Almaas, Ken Wilber, Jack Engler and Claudio Naranjo, rely
on object relations theory in their own models of psychological and spiritual
development. In particular, a number of transpersonal psychologists have found
remarkable parallels between the ancient Buddhist doctrine of the
illusory
nature of the self and this modern Western analysis of the
constructed
nature of the self. In his anthology
Transformations of Consciousness, coedited
with Ken Wilber and Daniel Brown, Jack Engler writes, "It may come as a
surprise that . . . both Buddhist psychology and psychoanalytic object relations
theory
define the essence of the ego in the same way." Needless
to say, since exploring the essence of the ego is exactly what we were seeking
to do, we wanted to speak with someone well-versed in object relations theory—a
subtle and complex interpretation of the architecture of the ego that is now
one of the most influential schools of contemporary psychological thought.
We were delighted when Otto Kernberg—one of the primary engineers of the
theory—squeezed an hour into his busy schedule to speak with us. Kernberg, who
at age seventy-two still works a seventy-plus-hour workweek, is a renowned psychoanalyst,
clinical researcher, developmental theorist, psychiatric treatment innovator—and
a legend in the annals of psychology. A native of Vienna, he immigrated to Chile
with his parents during the Second World War. He earned his undergraduate, medical
and psychoanalytic degrees in Santiago, where he began his professional and
academic career in the 1950s. Dr. Kernberg is not only a principal architect
of object relations theory but is also widely regarded as the world's leading
expert on borderline personality disorders and pathological narcissism. Current
President of the International Psychoanalytic Association, founded by Sigmund
Freud in 1908, he is also Director of the Personality Disorders Institute and
the Cornell Psychotherapy Program at The New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center
and Professor of Psychiatry at the Cornell University Medical College. He is
the author or coauthor of thirteen books as well as dozens of research papers.
In his more than forty years of research, including clinical work with severely
disturbed patients, Dr. Kernberg has inquired with laser-like precision into
the subatomic components of the psyche and identified what he believes are the
most fundamental building blocks in the construction of self-identity. In our
conversation, as he walked me through the basics of object relations theory,
I was drawn with him into looking at human experience through the piercing clarity
of the object relations microscope. I began to grasp intellectually, intuitively
and even experientially his intricate vision of how the separate sense of self
gradually takes shape from the moment of birth—how undifferentiated fragments
of raw experience eventually cohere into emotionally charged images of self
and others, and progressively coalesce into an integrated, internalized sense
of self and an integrated inner "representational world" of others.
Indeed, after a course in object relations from Kernberg himself, or after reading
the books in which he outlines his theory, it's hard not to be convinced that
selfhood is not inherent in human experience from birth, but is in fact entirely
a mechanically constructed phenomenon.
I found contemplating the nature of the self as described by object relations
theory to be a mesmerizing experience. Yet at the same time, I had the uneasy
feeling that as the separate sense of self was being deconstructed, so also
was the mysterious source of our humanity—like a woven sweater from which one
pulls a thread, unraveling it inch by inch, reducing it to a pile of cotton
fibers. A materialist scientist, Kernberg believes that the discovery of an
integrated theory of consciousness—modern psychology's Holy Grail—is the task
of neurobiology working in conjunction with modern research in psychoanalysis.
Speaking with Dr. Kernberg about the nature of the ego was meeting a visionary,
encountering a mind with rare quality of attention, expanse of perspective and
subtlety of discrimination. He possesses an unusual flexibility and originality
of thought that easily embraces subjects normally beyond the scope of traditional
psychoanalytic thinking, making him not only a defender of Freud's genius but
a Freudian revisionist with a mission for psychoanalysis in twenty-first-century
society and culture. I was honored to have the chance to explore the mystery
of the seeds of the self with one of modern psychology's foremost pioneers.