The Errant Selves Group

Soon after Kohut died, Arnold Goldberg initiated a monthly meeting for Chicago Institute faculty and candidates who wished to study Kohut’s ideas. After a few years, Sheldon Meyers took over the leadership, followed by David Solomon, Brenda Solomon, Scott Davis and, eventually, David Liberman.

When Goldberg published his 1999 book Being of Two Minds: The Vertical Split in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, he asked this Saturday morning group if we’d like to gather a Case Book based on his latest ideas, as Kohut had done in The Psychology of the Self: A Case Book (Kohut, 1993). Many of us jumped at the chance. We began meeting at the former Saturday morning “Kohut Study” times. We were all soon committed to the project, even though presenting on-going cases to one another and especially to Goldberg was not always comfortable.

Our group of fourteen met for more than three years. Seven of us wrote chapters, but everyone participated in the discussions that gave rise to them. We focused on behavior disorders, which Goldberg believed shouldn’t be treated with efforts to suppress behaviors—the usual therapeutic response—but rather with a commitment to understanding how misbehavior functions to defend our patients from deep and often hidden depressions.

In his introduction to the volume that came to be called Errant Selves, Goldberg cites Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

“This is an account of a man who ingests a magical potion to become someone else—although only temporarily and regrettably, repetitively. Dr. Jekyll can be said to be transformed into Mr. Hyde or seen as both men with different claims for recognition. Mr. Hyde does demonic things and Jekyll claims innocence, while Stevenson lets us know that Jekyll initiates and enjoys everything that Hyde does. Jekyll is of two minds and literally embodies what we call a vertical split. This is not the horizontal split of repression but rather that of disavowal and so is a [self]division available to conscio