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In the introduction to his new book, Arnold Goldberg states that therapists, whatever their background and discipline, live in two separate worlds. The world of treatment is delineated by rules and regulations that are quite different from the rules and regulations that apply to social life.
Goldberg's idea is that until the world of the therapist and that of social acquaintance are carefully separated and examined, difficulties will occur, especially in the area of ethics and morality. These difficulties exist to some degree in all practices, and we all share them, but it remains mostly unnoticed by most of us—hence the word “stealth” in the title of his book. Most analysts and therapists live and work in the zone between moral correctness and the desire to help their patients. The negotiation of this zone is the main theme of this book.
Goldberg is to be commended for pointing out that although The Principles of Medical Ethics, with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry, published by the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Psychoanalytic Association's Principles and Standards of Ethics for Psychoanalysts are necessary and helpful, they also can have adverse effects. They may restrict the psychoanalyst who submits to such standards from pursuing open inquiry in the analyses he or she conducts.
“Moral positions can have a profound impact on psychoanalysts' and psychotherapists' clinical practice without them being made explicit or often without our being aware of them. They have a ‘stealth-like’ existence and go undetected because of inattention. We need less to develop rules of proper behavior and guidelines for ethical practice (as important as they surely are), and more to recognize how unspoken and unrecognized moral postures have insinuated themselves in our daily practice. This may be more important than it seems, inasmuch as ultimately everything should be brought under the umbrella of our understanding whether we like it or not” (pp