Dear colleagues and ISTFP members,
We are happy to welcome you to the 7th ISTFP conference. We hope that this biennial “meeting of minds” will provide you with a memorable learning experience. Again this year, because of the COVID Pandemic, we cannot meet in person. We will not be able to, like in previous editions of the event, engage in meaningful human interactions. Since that important part of the event will be missing, let’s make the most of this, like we did two years ago, and look forward to seeing each other again in two years… for real.
I am Theophilus Kok and, like some of you, I was not there in the early ISTFP Conferences. That is why the Public Relations and Communication Committee and I thought it would be a good idea to tell you about the origin of the event. For those of you that have been here since the beginning, we thought that it would be important, after 3 difficult years, to remind ourselves where we come from and go forward with renewed energy and intent.
Meeting the needs of “difficult” patients
As you all know, personality disorders used to present severe treatment challenges in psychiatry, however, during the 1970s and 1980s along with the publishing of Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975), Severe Personality Disorders (1984), and the first treatment manual Psychodynamic Psychotherapy of Borderline Patients (1989), Otto. F. Kernberg and his team at the Personality Disorders Institute of Cornell University in New York have developed the Transference-Focused Psychotherapy.
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Theophilus Kok
Theophilus Kok is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in private practice in Hangzhou, China. He graduated from Zhejiang University in 2006 and started his training in TFP in 2018. He is the founder and director of the Institute of Personality Studies and Development, and the leader of the Personality Disorders Working Group in Kangning Hospital affiliated to Wenzhou Medical University. His interest is to treat patients with personality disorders and as the coordinator of TFP training in China, he aims to introduce TFP to more local clinicians.