Uncategorized

AI Tools for TFP Therapists – What They Can Offer and What It May Cost

Imagine this: after a difficult session, you want to consult your clinical formulation with an AI. You paste a fragment of your session notes into a chat window. Within seconds, you receive a thoughtful, well-structured response that helps you see the material from a new angle. But here is the question that should come first: what just happened to your patient’s data?

Artificial intelligence is already influencing psychotherapeutic practice in ways that would have seemed improbable just a few years ago. Some clinicians use it to draft case formulations. Others experiment with it as a thinking partner before supervision. Amy Levy, in a presentation for the APSA Council on AI, described presenting a twenty-year-old nightmare to ChatGPT – a dream about carrots marching in single line into a slaughterhouse. The AI’s response was striking: it asked analytically guided questions that encouraged linking the dream to waking life, invited personal associations, and worked to contain the raw experience of the dream. As Levy observed, the AI offered “transformation out of the discomfort and disorganization of human experiencing” within seconds (APSA Council on AI, 2024b). Whether or not we find this reassuring, it demonstrates a capacity that is difficult to dismiss.

This article offers a practical orientation for TFP clinicians who want to understand what current AI tools can do across clinical work, research, writing, and publication – and what using them means for the privacy of our patients’ data. It is not a product guide. Specific platforms and their features change too quickly for any printed recommendation to remain valid for long. Instead, the aim is to provide a framework that helps clinicians evaluate any AI tool, present or future, on their own terms.

This article contains exclusive content for ISTFP members.

If you already are a member of the ISTFP, login to read the full text. If you are not a current member of the ISTFP and want to enjoy all of our exclusive content such as blog posts and other resources, please click one of the links below and follow the instructions provided. We look forward to welcoming you to our community.

Renew Now or Join the ISTFP

Already a member? Log in here

Michal Novák

Michal Novák is a psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He works in private practice with adults, providing individual, couples, and family psychotherapy. His training also includes group psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and he is a TFP certified psychotherapist. He participates in the training of candidates in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and transference-oriented psychotherapy.

Author Website

Interview with Eve Caligor – January 2026

Uncategorized

This article contains exclusive content for ISTFP members.

Renew Now or Join the ISTFP

Already a member? Log in here

At the beginning of 2026, the ISTFP invites members into a reflective conversation on the foundations, evolution, and future of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy. In this recorded interview, Eve Caligor—a central figure in the development of TFP and lead author of the TFP-E manual—shares her personal path into the model, her experience of the landmark 2006 efficacy study, and her thinking on TFP-E, supervision, training, and applied forms of TFP. This rare and in-depth conversation offers a unique window into the clinical, theoretical, and institutional evolution of TFP—and into the community that continues to carry it forward.

Watch interview with Diana Diamond: TFP and attachement

Uncategorized

Implementing Transference-Focused Psychotherapy Principles (2024)

Uncategorized

Richard G. Hersh, Chiara De Panfilis

This book focuses on the practical utility of key precepts of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) in contemporary psychiatry. This volume actively addresses the pressing public health crisis related to high numbers of patients with personality disorder pathology, often with significantly compromised functioning associated with marked social burdens related to health costs and lost productivity.

TFP is one of the empirically validated treatments for patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Building on this evidence base, the contributors to this volume describe their work in multiple clinical situations utilizing these principles with varying patient populations in different treatment settings. These settings include: the adult and adolescent day hospital, short term and extended inpatient hospitalizations, group therapy, and a range of outpatient services. Each chapter follows a consistent format to cover patient population, nature of treatment setting, overview of financial support, training of clinicians, treatment targets, elements of TFP employed, measurement of effectiveness, case study examples, and future research goals. Contributors from different backgrounds describe active use of TFP principles in their work, with adjustments from standard TFP protocol made accordingly.

Implementing Transference-Focused Psychotherapy Principles builds on the growing literature about TFP by expanding the focus beyond the extended individual psychotherapy format. The text will resonate with psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and mental health counselors, among others. Clinicians involved in public health systems will find the material outlined of particular value in our evolving world of mental health services.

Implementing Transference-Focused psychotherapy principles. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-68062-5

BUy Book

This article contains exclusive content for ISTFP members.

Renew Now or Join the ISTFP

Already a member? Log in here

Friends of the ISTFP – Fourth ESSPD Summer School 2025

Uncategorized

Investigating Psychosocial Dysfunction in Personality Disorders

The European Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ESSPD) is proud to announce the fourth ESSPD Summer School for early career researchers, organized in collaboration with the University of Parma, Department of Medicine and Surgery, Section of Psychiatry, with the financial support of the Cariparma Foundation and the Personality Disorders Lab.

Aims

The aim of the summer school is to increase the methodological competencies in conducting high quality research in the domain of psychosocial functioning and recovery in personality disorders (PD) from multiple perspectives. It will be acheived by interactive presentations, group discussions, speed-talk presentations.

Research topics

The research topics will focus on trajectories of psychosocial functioning in PD and associated risk and protective factors; neurobiological correlates of the processes involved in social functioning and social learning; computational approaches to study social functioning; inclusion of the perspective of people with lived experience in research designs on recovery; and treatment strategies to address self and interpersonal functioning.

Date and location

The Summer School will take place on August 31st (arrival day) – September 6th (departure day), 2025 at the Alba del Borgo agriturismo (province of Parma, Italy). This friendly residential context for both teachers and students ensures many spaces and informal occasions to create networks among participants.

Faculty

Katja Bertsch
Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Department of Psychology,
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

Rasa Barkauskiené
Developmental Psychopathology Research Center, Institute of Psychology,
Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

Chiara De Panfilis
Associate Professor in Psychiatry, Department of Medicine and Surgery,
University of Parma, Parma, Italy

Filip De Fruyt
Department of Developmental, Personality and Social Psychology,
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

Joost Hutsebaut
De Viersprong National Institute for Personality Disorder,
Halsteren, The Netherlands

Paolo Ossola
Associate Professor in Psychiatry, Department of Medicine and Surgery,
University of Parma, Parma, Italy

Luca Sasdelli
ESSPD Lived Experience Group and Bologna Recovery College,
Bologna, Italy

Registration process

Applications must be forwarded by e-mail to [email protected] and received by February 1st, 2025.

All applications must contain a letter of motivation, a curriculum vitae and a 1-page summary of the relevant research project and how it relates to the applicant’s motivation to attend the Summer School (in one PDF file). Applications from early career researchers affiliated with an Eastern European University are encouraged.

All PhD students, MDs, or early post-doctoral fellows affiliated with a European university are welcome to the summer camp.

Fees

[Read more…]

TFP Training events

Uncategorized

We will help you

Dear members, my name is Diana Téllez and I am in charge of communication for the TFP training events. Contact me if you what all our members to know what you are planning.

Diana Téllez

Diana Téllez has worked as a Psychotherapist with a psychodynamic approach since 2005, Obtained a master’s degree in psychotherapy of children, adolescents, and adults in 2009 and a PhD in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy by the Mexican Psychoanalytic Association in 2012.
She’s a Mexican Teacher-Supervisor certified by the ISTFP, has clinical practice in TFP since 2011. She emerged as a founding member of Grupo TFP Mexico, has knowledge in certified mentalization. In addition to experience with attachment theory, she’s certified as a reliable interviewer / evaluator in the adult attachment interview (AAI) accredited by the University of Berkeley and a certified educator/facilitator from Circle of Security, institution based in Washington.
Since 2016 she is responsible for the Psychology Department at a public hospital part of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) in Mexico City.
On the other hand, Diana Téllez, has been part of the Academic Committee of Mexico since 2016, involved in the organization and delivery of multiple training and supervision in TFP, with topics such as TFP Basics, TFP applied to the TNP, training for the application and qualification of the STIPO-R.
Her interest in teaching has led her to lecture at different universities and institutions, such as the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the Monterrey’s Institute of Technology (ITESM) and the National Institute of Psychiatry Ramón de la Fuente (INPRF).
At the same time, she’s been the main point of contact for public relations, social media and promotion of Grupo TFP México, as such she’s been in direct contact with TFP stakeholders from other regions.