Robin Kissell, MD

Founder & Director

Robin Kissell, MD is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. Between 2005 and 2016 she was director of the Borderline Personality Disorder Initiative, a residency-training clinic founded on MBT and designed after the original day-hospital program at Halliwick Unit. Currently she is Director of The Mentalizing Initiative, a non-profit organization offering training to community-based clinicians in MBT and other treatments for those with personality disorders known to enhance mentalizing. She was trained in MBT by Peter Fonagy, Anthony Bateman and Trudie Rossouw and supervised in MBT by Anthony Bateman. In addition to keeping a busy private practice, she supervises clinicians in MBT, teaches the core-curriculum on personality disorders to psychiatry trainees, consults to clinical teams and research projects implementing MBT and speaks frequently at conferences on personality and personality disorders.