Perverse sexual behavior--from mild variations on heterosexual activity to fetishism to cross-dressing--is usually linked to sexual and/or aggressive conflicts in childhood. In this book, Dr. Arnold Goldberg explains and interprets perverse behavior in a different way, by drawing on concepts of psychoanalytic self psychology, a variant of psychoanalysis that originated with Dr. Heinz Kohut and that concentrates on the self as a psychological structure. Psychoanalytic self psychology, says Dr. Goldberg, makes disorders of perversion more understandable and more accessible to treatment. Dr. Goldberg expands the definition of perversion, claiming that it is based on three essential components: sexualization (as distinct from sexuality); vertical splitting (where perverse action resides in the split-off part of the self and the other sector of the self, which knows right from wrong, is temporarily stilled); and psychological family dynamics. Dr. Goldberg explains each of these three dimensions and provides a number of illustrations. He also discusses the possibility of interpreting homosexuality as a compensatory structure, the relation of hostility to perversion, types of perverse behavior that are readily treatable, and the reasonable goals of such treatment.

Volume 2 wrestles with two questions that remain timely in the present: (1) whether self psychology can be integrated with classical psychoanalysis (H. Curtis, M. Basch), and (2) whether self psychology actually differs in practice from classical psychoanalysis (R. Wallerstein, E. Wolf). Discussions by E. Markson & P. Thomson, R. Stolorow, P. Tolpin, and J. Levy bring different perspectives to bear on these knotty issues. The implications of self psychology for our understanding of infant and adolescent development are explored, respectively, by M. Tolpin and M. & E. Shane. Additional contributions span the topics of supervision (J. Sloane), somatization (W. Rickles), and suicide (D. Reiser), and include theoretical papers by B. Brandchaft, R. Stolorow, H. Muslin, and D. Detrick.

A psychiatrist writes a letter to a journal explaining his decision to marry a former patient. Another psychiatrist confides that most of his friends are ex-patients. Both practitioners felt they had to defend their behavior, but psychoanalyst Arnold Goldberg couldn't pinpoint the reason why. What was wrong about the analysts' actions? In Moral ...

Many people lead multi faceted lives. Arnold Goldberg is one of these. He is a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst, a teacher, a supervisor, an editor, and an author. He was Director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, editor of the journal Progress in Self Psychology and is famous for having begun his career as Heinz Kohut's most original student and later his closest colleague. After Kohut died Goldberg finished How Does Analysis Cure? His writings are incredibly wide ranging, his interest in all things psychoanalytic breathtaking as the selections in this book testify. I especially love his work on Behavior Disorders not simply because I was fortunate enough to write for the Case Book he edited on the subject, but because his ideas changed forever my thinking on acting out patients and transformed my clinical results with them. Kohut may have originated the idea of the vertical split in self psychology, but Goldberg has taken the idea to places no other self psychologist has gone.