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Errant Selves: A Casebook of Misbehavior is a wonderful illustration of Arnold Goldberg's seminal elaboration (1995, 1999) of Kohut's concept of vertical splits. His newest volume compiles eight clinical
case presentations of the treatment of perversions, delinquencies, and addictions. Errant Selves is especially compelling in its accounts of what happens to therapists on entering the “bowels” of cases of “misbehaviors”—that is, behavioral disorders in which fragile narcissistic cohesion is maintained by a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like reality in which Mr. Hyde performs the very misdeeds that Dr. Jekyll himself might enjoy, there but for the annoying inconvenience of his intervening conscience. Of course, “the magic potion” that creates Hyde's acts of abomination is itself the substance of Jekyll's disavowal, as it is he, the good doctor, who repeatedly reaches for the vial. Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, reintroduced in Goldberg's introduction, captures the essence of how conscious disavowal preserves the vertical split, a process quite different from what is seen in misbehaviors arising from derivatives of unconscious repression.
To say that the act of disavowal is conscious, however, is not to suggest that it is “chosen.” Indeed, Goldberg and his colleagues argue that the misbehaviors documented in the text are matters of necessity: “With our commitment to understanding the symptom rather than treating the behavior, we saw it primarily as necessary for achieving a sense of self-consolidation in our patients” (p. vii) Thus, the patients' behavior disorders were understood as their best adaptation under the circumstances of a paucity of developmental selfobject functions necessary to the regulation of self-esteem and cohesion; the activities manifesting the behavior disorders are then understood as stabilizers of the fragile personality. This interpretation, which is both understanding and compassionate, is juxtaposed with another tone that pervades the book and that is