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In “Some Limits of the Boundary Concept”, Arnold Goldberg begins a conversation that is almost impossible in the current era. He aims to discuss dispassionately our contemporary views of both boundary crossings and boundary violations, a topic that arouses so much anxiety and anguish within the profession and outside of it that it is difficult to question our assumptions about it with any reasoned approach.
Goldberg argues that in this pluralistic climate, there is no agreement on what constitutes either a boundary crossing or a boundary violation, for, as we might say, one analyst's boundary crossing is another analyst's empathy. As a consequence, disputes about technique are often framed in moral or ethical terms. Because of this conflation—and to advance our discourse—Goldberg suggests that we must differentiate the moral from the technical dimensions of the concept of boundaries. Every school of analysis has its own unique technical rules that are distinct from moral ones:
The reason not to hold hands may or may not be based on technical standards. The reason not to have sexual intercourse is generally based upon moral standards. Efforts to put both of these on the same continuum mistake quantitative issues for qualitative distinctions. [p. 870]
In the end, every analyst must arrive at his or her own judgment about what technical rules to uphold, and when in the interest of