You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In a characteristically pithy formulation, Arnold Goldberg observes that: “To sum up much of today's psychoanalysis, we might describe it … as the variety of ways analysts cope with the problems of their patients” (p. 44). The same phrase could be adapted to describe the subject matter of this book: it concerns the variety of ways analysts cope with the felt expectation of being virtuous. Like the book itself, these phrases pack a great deal of thought and argument into a few words, and require some unpacking.
Goldberg argues that the community of analysts and analytic psychotherapists currently suffers from a form of professional superego pathology; he articulates a set of moral standards that we have set for ourselves unselfconsciously, and decries these as unrealistic and/or unhelpful to our patients. Interwoven with these arguments, he offers a reminder of the ubiquity of value-laden concerns in analysis, a proposal to base a rethinking of these concerns in the philosophical tradition of ‘pragmatism’, several trenchant asides on the evolution of analytic theory and practice, and a presentation of a genuinely neutral stance, illustrating how radical this idea must be.
Goldberg repeatedly makes clear his belief that the entire profession operates under the influence of a “… subterranean world of unexamined but powerful directions for living and behaving properly” (p. viii); he states that: “Somewhere along the way, the good analyst and therapist was seen to carry an aura of saintliness whereby those qualities of curiosity, hope, kindness, courage, honesty, purposeful-ness, integrity, and the like became requirements or principles on a par with the need for surgical scrubbing” (p. 27). He outlines how developments in analytic theory contributed to these expectations, especially Alexander's ideas on corrective emotional experience and Kohut's emphasis on the centrality of empathy. He cites a few examples in the more current literature of the attitudes he decries, incl