Otto Kernberg: The Seeds of the Self

An interview with Otto Kernberg
by Susan Bridle

                                                     Introduction

Otto Kernberg

When we began doing research for this issue of What Is Enlightenment? eight months ago, exploring as many different spiritual and psychological approaches to understanding the ego as we could get our hands on, a contemporary psychoanalytic philosophy of ego development known as "object relations theory" captured our attention. We were fascinated to discover that many leading thinkers at the interface of psychology and spirituality, including A. H. Almaas, Ken Wilber, Jack Engler and Claudio Naranjo, rely on object relations theory in their own models of psychological and spiritual development. In particular, a number of transpersonal psychologists have found remarkable parallels between the ancient Buddhist doctrine of the illusory nature of the self and this modern Western analysis of the constructed nature of the self. In his anthology Transformations of Consciousness, coedited with Ken Wilber and Daniel Brown, Jack Engler writes, "It may come as a surprise that . . . both Buddhist psychology and psychoanalytic object relations theory define the essence of the ego in the same way." Needless to say, since exploring the essence of the ego is exactly what we were seeking to do, we wanted to speak with someone well-versed in object relations theory—a subtle and complex interpretation of the architecture of the ego that is now one of the most influential schools of contemporary psychological thought.
( Read more... )

Otto Kernberg: The Seeds of the Self

An interview with Otto Kernberg
by Susan Bridle

                                                     Introduction

Otto Kernberg

When we began doing research for this issue of What Is Enlightenment? eight months ago, exploring as many different spiritual and psychological approaches to understanding the ego as we could get our hands on, a contemporary psychoanalytic philosophy of ego development known as "object relations theory" captured our attention. We were fascinated to discover that many leading thinkers at the interface of psychology and spirituality, including A. H. Almaas, Ken Wilber, Jack Engler and Claudio Naranjo, rely on object relations theory in their own models of psychological and spiritual development. In particular, a number of transpersonal psychologists have found remarkable parallels between the ancient Buddhist doctrine of the illusory nature of the self and this modern Western analysis of the constructed nature of the self. In his anthology Transformations of Consciousness, coedited with Ken Wilber and Daniel Brown, Jack Engler writes, "It may come as a surprise that . . . both Buddhist psychology and psychoanalytic object relations theory define the essence of the ego in the same way." Needless to say, since exploring the essence of the ego is exactly what we were seeking to do, we wanted to speak with someone well-versed in object relations theory—a subtle and complex interpretation of the architecture of the ego that is now one of the most influential schools of contemporary psychological thought.
( Read more... )