Boundaries, Technique, and Self-Deception: A Discussion of Arnold Goldberg's “Some Limits of the Boundary Concept”

Arnold Goldberg has long been a thoughtful critic of psychoanalysis and its derivatives. In this challenge to conventional thinking about professional boundaries and boundary violations, Goldberg stresses the failure to discriminate between technical and moral dimensions of psychoanalytic practice. He uses the adjective moral to cover the prohibitions and imperatives that regulate ethics.

I prefer to think of ethics as involving codes established by professional organizations to assure that those who put themselves in a vulnerable position are not exposed to behaviors that have the potential for harm. There is undoubtedly a moral dimension to eth-ics—the axiom to do no harm is inherently a moral admonition. Nevertheless, morality is far more personal and idiosyncratic than ethics. Also, ethics is about specific actions, regardless of the underlying intent or unconscious determinants.

Goldberg asserts that there are a variety of behaviors known as boundary violations in which the single quality of being damaging is absent. This simple statement is far more complicated than it appears. Ethics codes, from which boundary violations devolve, are written to help analysts think about how certain behaviors in the clinical setting might have the potential for harm. We cannot say