Letters

To the Editor:

As an admirer of Arnold Goldberg's The Problem of Perversion I was disturbed by John Auerbach's review (Psychoanalytic Books, 8, 87-92), which while nominally positive seems to me also both contentious and misleading. Auerbach writes in the unfortunate tradition of reviewers who chiefly complain that the book they have undertaken to consider isn't some entirely other sort of book, as if it might be well to attack an apple for failing to be an orange. Thus, since Auerbach's interest is the intersubjective and interpersonal, he takes Goldberg to task for neglecting a “relational” perspective—never mind that Goldberg's subtitle is The View from Self Psychology—and peevishly scolds Goldberg for failing to reference works on behaviorism and pharmacology: “in an age of literature searches done on CD-ROM these omissions are glaring.” Not perhaps to a reader expecting “a view from self psychology.”

A subtler problem is the way Auerbach misreads Goldberg. For example, he charges that Goldberg is among those who privilege normal—“presumably heterosexual”—sexuality “over [presumably homosexual] forms of sexual expression.” This is unfair and evidently represents Auerbach's misunderstanding of Goldberg's idea of compensatory self structure. Goldberg is perfectly clear as to what he considers “normal sexuality,” for him (as it was for Kohut) it is the joyful expression of a vigorous and cohesive self. Auerbach gets this much right. But because Goldberg believes that at least some psychologically generated forms of homosexuality are effects of early damage to one of the (originally) two poles of Kohut's (originally) bi-polar self and that such damage may be overcome by the compensatory intactness of the alternative pole, Auerbach evidently chooses to believe that Goldberg considers the sexuality of such individuals inferior to that of heterosexuals. This isn't the case. For Goldberg, compensatory structures—unlike