The Applied TFP Committee

Dear members,

I am Chiara De Panfilis, co-chair of the Applied TFP Committee. Together with my co-chair, Richard Hersh, I will present you the members of our committee, its history and achievements.

Our committee is comprised of twelve members: Eve Caligor (USA), Sergio Dazzi (Italy), Chiara De Panfilis (Italy), Richard Hersh (USA), Tennyson Lee (UK), Jonathan Radcliffe (UK), Michael Rentrop (Germany), Eulalia Ripoll (Spain), Christiane Roesch (Switzerland), Maria Jesús Rufat (Spain), Luis Valenciano (Spain), Jo-anna VanDenBosch (UK). 

We aim to bring together, to study, and to develop the various applications of TFP principles in mental health settings other than the standard, twice-a-week outpatient individual psychotherapy setting.

Examples include, but are not limited to:

• Modifications of TFP for family interventions, group therapy, or forensic settings
• Implementation of inpatient treatment for personality disorders (PD) with TFP principles techniques and strategies
• Application of TFP principles within a variety of clinical situations and experiences such as:
  • general outpatient psychiatric care for PD
  • consultation-liaison psychiatry or medical settings
  • psychoeducation interventions.

Broadly speaking, such initiatives are referred to as “Applied TFP”. Examples of some of the elements of TFP that can be brought into these different settings are an emphasis on the role of a clear treatment frame and the utility of conceptualizing any clinical encounter in terms of the internal representations of self and other that are activated.

Chiara De Panfilis

MD, Associate Professor in Psychiatry

Chiara De Panfilis, MD, is an associate professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Medicine and Surgery, Unit of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Italy. Her main research interests are the potential social-cognitive mechanisms that shape the clinical picture and the psychosocial functioning of individuals suffering with personality disorders. She was previously a visiting research fellow at the Personality Disorders Institute of Weill Cornell Medical School, New York. For her research she received a grant from the International Psychoanalytic Association and awards from the International Society of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (ISTFP) and the Society for Personality Assessment. She is co-founder and research coordinator of the Personality Disorders Lab (Parma-Milan, Italy). She is a board member of the ISTFP and is clinically active in implementing general psychiatric care for personality disorders with TFP principles. She authored
more than sixty peer-reviewed publications.

Richard G. Hersh

MD, Special Lecturer, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University 

Richard G. Hersh, MD, was an attending psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospitals while an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School before coming to Columbia University Medical Center where he was a psychiatrist on the inpatient service before serving for fifteen years as the Associate Director of the Department of Psychiatry’s Intensive Outpatient Program. He has been trained in Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) for treatment of personality disorders and has fulfilled the requirements for Teacher and Supervisor status for TFP. He as serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Education Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder (NEA-BPD) and recently co-authored the textbook “Fundamentals of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy: Applications in Psychiatric and Medical Settings” published in 2017 by Springer.