The Problem of Perversion. : By Arnold Goldberg. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1995. Pp. 204.

As psychoanalysis has become more pluralistic, contemporary psychoanalysts have become more aware of the influence of theory upon clinical data. An analyst hears and interprets facts that his theory prepares him to recognise. A good new theoretical model helps us to identify new patterns in clinical material. For the best analytic clinicians, theory structures listening, but not so tightly that the analyst cannot be surprised. Ideally, the influence of theory upon clinical data is reciprocal; surprising clinical findings lead the analyst to reconsider and revise his theory. In his recent volume, The Problem of Perversion, Arnold Goldberg, a leading self-psychologist, shows himself to be an excellent analytic listener. As we follow his exposition of the psychology of perversion, new patterns come into focus. These have the potential to enrich the clinical work of analysts from other schools, as well as those who work within self-psychology. It is to Goldberg's credit that his clinical observations sometimes challenge aspects of his model. At times, these lead him to broaden his theoretical frame; at other times, he appears to strain his theoretical model to contain them.

Goldberg's focus on the unfolding and developmental history of self-object transferences brings into high relief two organising themes that appear to coexist in the mental life of the person with a perversion. The first might be called a theme of deficient psychic structure. The pressure that these patients feel to enact their perversions, or even to fantasise about them, rises and falls with the status of their self-object ties. The absence or disruption of the tie to the self-object makes them more symptomatic; the restoration of the self-object tie brings relief. Because the ebb and flow of symptoms appears responsive only to the presence or absence of the self-object bond (and not to the circumstances or dynamics associated with its breach or restoration), Goldberg attributes this aspect of perver