Dr. Richard Hersh is a Special Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He received his undergraduate B.A. degree in History from Stanford University and his M.D. degree from George Washington University. He completed his residency training in psychiatry at Northwestern University and earned a certificate in psychoanalytic training from the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

Dr. Hersh 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.

Dr. Hersh 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. Dr. Hersh has also been trained in Good Psychiatric Management for Borderline Personality Disorder (GPM) and has fulfilled the requirements of Official Trainer status for GPM. Dr. Hersh teaches TFP in the Columbia Psychiatry residency curriculum.

He co-authored with Eve Caligor, M.D. and Frank Yeomans, M.D., Ph.D., the textbook Fundamentals of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy: Applications in Psychiatric and Medical Settings, published in 2016 by Springer, and he is the co-editor of the forthcoming Implementing Transference-Focused Psychotherapy: General Psychiatric Care for Personality Disorders with Chiara De Panfilis, M.D., also by Springer.

Overview of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy 

• Evidence-based treatment for patients with borderline personality disorder
• Extended use to patients with a variety of personality disorder diagnoses
• Manualized
• Informed by psychoanalytic Object Relations Theory
• Twice weekly, one to three years
• Anchored by the structural interview (an interview that reflects the emerging hybrid categorical/dimensional model of personality disorder diagnosis in the DSM-5 appendix, Alternative Model of Personality Disorders or AMPD)
• Anchored by a detailed treatment contract
• Has goals of both symptom reduction and improved functioning

Applied Transference-Focused Psychotherapy

• Use of TFP principles outside of an extended individual psychotherapy
• Use in acute care settings (Emergency Department, Inpatient Psychiatry, Consultation-Liaison Service)
• Use for prescribers
• Use as an overarching risk management strategy
• Use in multiple public health settings (community outreach teams, forensic settings, psychoeducation programs)