Transference focused psychotherapy: Overview and update

This paper describes a specific psychoanalytic psychotherapy for patients with severe per-sonality disorders, its technical approach and specific research projects establishing empir-ical evidence supporting its efficacy. This treatment derives from the findings of the Menninger Foundation Psychotherapy Research project, and applies a model of contempor-ary psychoanalytic object relations theory as its theoretical foundation. The paper differen-tiates this treatment from alternative psychoanalytic approaches, including other types of psychoanalytic psychotherapy as well as standard psychoanalysis, and from three alternative non-analytical treatments prevalent in the treatment of borderline patients, namely, dialectic behavior therapy, supportive psychotherapy based on psychoanalytic theory, and schema focused therapy. It concludes with indications and contraindications to this particular thera-peutic approach derived from the clinical experience that evolved in the course of the sequence of research projects leading to the empirical establishment of its efficacy