Personality Development: The Theories of Melanie Klein and Otto Kernberg (& the Riggs Opportunity)

Okay. They they say that um there was a rabbi once who could recite the entire Talmud while standing on one foot. The challenge of presenting the theory of Melanie Klein and Otto Krinberg in one hour is a similar kind of challenge. I used to teach theory at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute for several

decades. And I realized after doing it for a while that the that theory is a cumbersome burden for any clinician to integrate. And so I had people read the theory and then I had them present cases. And I use the cases to elaborate the theory. So, I'm going to try to do that

today to make this complicated set of ideas more accessible. We'll see how how it goes. Okay, this is what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about applying theory to our clinical understanding of personality disorder to trace the development of internal object relationships to compare Klein and Karnberg to understand projective identification

and hopefully to link these theorists to the potential of all of you becoming the next generation of theorists. That's the plan. So, let me talk a little bit about personality. Personality is who we are. and how [clears throat] we seem to others. It reflects an enduring set of patterns of behavior and it's developed

in the cauldron of family life from the interaction or constitutional givens of the child, their bodies, their sensitivities, their reactivity, their capacities and their limitations and the pressures of the environment, the nature of the family. Not all theorists pay attention to that, but I will try to link that in. Children are unconsciously shaped to

maximize their caretaking capacities of their environment. Hold on to that. That matters because it's a two-way street in child development. Personality is egoonic. We don't notice that we have personalities. We just think we are who we are. Other people notice. It feels normal to us. We don't accurately see ourselves without help from others. We are completely dependent