Commentary on Arnold Goldberg's “Some Limits of the Boundary Concept”

I want to thank Arnold Goldberg for giving us this important opportunity to reflect upon a quintessential psychoanalytic concept: the notion of boundaries. Goldberg argues that in our current climate of psychoanalytic pluralism, the concept of boundaries has questionable usefulness. He suggests that there has often been a failure amongst some colleagues to discriminate between the technical and moral dimensions of boundaries. Goldberg proposes separating these domains and replacing the concept of boundaries with the concept of rules, in order to circumvent problems that arise from conflating technical with moral dimensions.

In principle, I am in agreement with the basic premises of this paper. However, I do not necessarily agree with the prescribed solutions. In my discussion, I will make two points: the first definitional, the second clinical.

As analysts, we treat the word boundary as we do so many other foundational psychoanalytic concepts, as if it enjoyed a shared unitary meaning. Plainly, it does not. As Goldberg points out, various theoretical orientations conceptualize boundaries differently. But what complicates the matter even more than Goldberg suggests is that each of us may use the concept of boundary in a different