All right, I'm here with Dr. Odo Kernberg. He's a psychiatrist born in Vienna, Austria, immigrated to Chile. Subsequently came to America and is the founder of Transference Focus Therapy

and was instrumental in our understanding of things like borderline level of organization.

We're going to have a discussion today about his life, about the things that he wrote and ideas that he came up with

and the evolution of it.

So welcome to the podcast.

Can we start by, I know you're born in Austria, Vienna in 1928 and you fled Nazi occupied

Austria with your family to Chile.

Tell me a little bit about that. Well, I was nine years and a half.

Hitler invaded March 1938,

and I left with my parents on July 16, 1939.

My father didn't want to leave.

He happened to be an Austrian monarchist and he believed all of this was going just passing

by.

Hitler was a transitorial phenomenon.

He had a strong belief in Austria, so Austrian survival.

My mother had paranoid features.

She was frightened through death with the invasion of the Anschluss.

And then after Christal night, which in Vienna occurred on December 10, 1938, she convinced

my father that we had to leave.

So we got the visa to Chile.

And of course, I didn't know anything that didn't.

I'm an only child.

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