Paulina Kernberg, who died Wednesday at 71, was a child psychologist and one of the leading experts on the effects of divorce on children.

A professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and founder of the Children of Divorce program at the college’s White Plains clinic, Kernberg was brought in by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 2000 to consult with and then evaluate the Cuban boy who was taken by force from his relatives in Miami, Elian Gonzalez, and returned to his father, under a barrage of charged publicity.

Days after the removal, Kernberg talked with the boy, who was staying with his father in temporary quarters in Baltimore.

According to a court affidavit she filed, Elian “played with some plastic toy soldiers that I had brought with me to assess his reaction to their appearance, which was not unlike that of the officers who had retrieved him from his Miami relatives’ home,” she wrote. “He engaged in this sequence of play with pleasure and without anxiety. He felt loved.”

Elian also drew a picture of a man on a mountaintop, and said it showed “daddy looking around.” Kernberg said she interpreted the drawing to mean that he regarded his father as his protector.

Unanimity on the symbolism was lacking; a child psychiatrist hired by the Miami relatives told the Los Angeles Times, “So he drew his father on a mountain, big deal.”

Kernberg and two other government-appointed psychiatrists continued to make biweekly visits to Elian until he returned to Cuba, later that year. (Elian’s mother drowned while escaping with him on a raft from Cuba.)

In 2001, Kernberg visited his second grade classroom in Cuba, and reported that Elian had adapted well and seemed happy playing with friends.

“I agree with what Janet Reno said when the boy departed, that she wished that Elian could grow up in a democracy, where voices of all convictions are heard and individual rights respected,” Kernberg told the Newsletter of Columbia Weill Cornell Psychiatry in 2001. “Nonetheless … Elian should be able to deal constructively with the tragic circumstances in his life.” She also expressed hope that, with time, Elian would have a good relationship with his Miami relatives, too, whom she characterized as “a good extended family, one that we would wish every child to have.”

“They had their own psychiatrists and adviser so I have to say that in my opinion they were not counseled well,” Kernberg told the Associated Press in 2000.

Kernberg was raised in Chile, graduated college at age 17, and was a medical doctor by 23. In 1959, she and her future husband, Otto Kernberg, also a young doctor, traveled to Baltimore to study psychiatry. Their careers ran parallel with the precision of synchronized swimmers as they attended the Menninger Clinic in Kansas, came to New York, found appointments at Columbia, and then became faculty at Weill Cornell. Mr. Kernberg is a well-known specialist in narcissism and borderline personalities.

The importance of the parent-child bond was at the center of much of Kernberg’s work on divorce, too. Divorce, she said, was the second worst trauma a child could undergo, exceeded only by the death of a parent. The psychological scars, she warned, lingered, and in many cases a child was better served living in a loveless or contentious marriage than shuttling between separate households.

Accused once at a lecture of siding with the children, Kernberg replied that this was the existential choice she had made. Her play therapy setup at the White Plains clinic included interconnected tipis that children would dub “mommy’s house” and “daddy’s house,” while crawling through plastic tunnels. They would have imaginary conversations on toy telephones with absent parents. “Their language is play,” Kernberg told the New York Times in a 1997 profile. “And in play they can make different endings.”

Kernberg occasionally served as an expert witness in divorces. In 2000, her testimony helped establish the first case in New York State in which visitation rights were awarded to half of a lesbian couple.

Widely published in academic journals, Kernberg also wrote “Good Vibrations – Straight Talk and Solid Advice for Kids” (1979) and, with two other authors, the handbook “Personality Disorders in Children and Adolescents” (2000).

Paulina Kernberg

Born January 10, 1935, in Santiago, Chile; died April 12 of cancer in New York City; survived by her husband, Otto Kernberg, her son, Martin, and daughters, Karen and Adine.