Otto Kernberg
Otto Kernberg, one of the leading psychoanalysts globally, is a role model for everyone who thinks about people, because of his unshakeable exactitude with which he attempts to understand the inner logic of clients. Equally, the tenacity, with which he emphasizes the loving as well as the aggressive impulses of the soul, is a reminder not to naïvely focus on one of the two poles. The idea, that the individual only has good traits, can be found again and again in humanistic psychology, and it is not helpful at all for people and, in particular, for their counselling.
One can learn a lot from Kernberg and his concepts. In Kernberg’s research you can find a multitude of connections for processing destructive sides in the client, which can be utilised and evaluated meta-theoretically. However, in the examination of his texts it is also important to leave aside the outdated, ideological aspects of psychoanalytical theory speculation and the sometimes peculiar, fundamental adherence to Freudian concepts, as if they were holy scriptures.