The Psychodynamic Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder: An Introduction to Transference-Focused Psychotherapy

The authors describe the application of a twice-weekly exploratory psychotherapy, transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP), to patients with borderline personality disorder. The article describes the pathology of internal object relations that provides a framework for understanding borderline personality and how TFP establishes a treatment framework to address such pathology and set the stage for working at the level of internal psychological structure. An outline of the assessment and treatment protocol is described along with a case example to illustrate the same.