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The clinical issues introduced by the question of character have been important in defining what constitutes “change” in psychoanalysis and how the analytic practitioner differentiates change resulting from psychoanalysis from change resulting from any other therapeutic treatment. Psychoanalytic treatment, we believe, is able to bring about change in the basic character of a person. By character we mean a person's habitual style of perceiving, interacting, organizing experience, satisfying drives, defending against psychic tension states, and generally presenting himself or herself and being perceived in the world. To understand the treatment of individuals who have committed criminal acts, it is necessary to conceptualize how we think character change can happen through treatment.
In the book under review, The Evil We Do: The Psychoanalysis of Destructive People, Carl Goldberg, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, discusses a number of cases in which the main protagonists have committed crimes most of us would consider heinous, serious, antisocial, or psychopathic, and that indicate a deficiency, a serious flaw, or an incompletely constituted ego, superego, or both on the part of the individual who committed the crime in question. The cases are interesting and diverse. Each of the case histories presented by Goldberg is an interesting example, at various times in the life cycle, of an antisocial character who evidences character traits that Goldberg, in his present-day moral and ethical systems, considers negative and that need to be changed. He takes a strong moral stance in relation to his patients and criticizes Freudian theory for the purportedly “neutral” stance recommended for the analyst treating such patients. Whereas Freud, he claims, would see anything less than analytic neutrality as representing unwanted countertransference interference, Goldberg believes that the analyst's “obvious” moral position in the analysis is a vital ingredient of analytic treatment