[.ca] Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions (ISBN 0300050038)

The Infant and the Deviant:
Kernberg has arguably contributed more than anyone - even more than Kohut - to the understanding of borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. He is both a formidable theoretician and an outstanding clinician. This - a small part of his prodigious and erudite output - is a detailed and scholarly study of the role played in the dynamics of relationships by narcissism, aggression - both self-directed (as in masochism) and other-directed (as in sadism) - and the resulting perversions. It is disturbing to learn how central the role of hatred, envy and other transformations of aggression is in relationships and in antisocial behavior. There is a direct path from regressive infantilism to psychosis and sexual deviance (and one may add to political oppression). This tome is one of the best anatomies of psychological defenses gone awry. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".

Excellent book on aggression:
Excellent book, author is an expert in narcissistic defenses and agression, but other personality disorders are also well covered. Kernberg deserves credit because personality disorders are difficult to describe because they are so disorganized, dishonest, and chameleon-like. The analysis of aggression in relationships is valuable for people in many fields. Kernberg provides wonderfully candid descriptions of his own negative or inappropriate feelings towards patients, cases where pateints refuse to cooperate with treatment, and cases where these patients manage to use hospital politics (!) to thwart treatment. My initial impression was that there seemed to be a bit too much jargon and the subsequent hair-splitting. As I read it, time and again I summarized long paragraphs by jotting down 5 to 10 words in the margin. But he does so as part of thorough overview of difficult literature, and considering the amount of ground he covers, this book could have been much longer. Odd he doesn't mention Facism, when the description of violent narcissistic sadists who embrace tyrants is so evocative of strutting Nazis. And his final chapters on perversion versus healthy sexual function is strikingly similar to Krafft-Ebing's "An Attempt to Explain Masochism," who reached their conslusions long before Freud and developed a clearer definition of healthy functioning than Freud.