You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
To put Goldberg's third book, The Prisonhouse of Psychoanalysis, in perspective, I should remind you that the author not only occupies a central role in self psychology but was also the president and director of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago and, as such, sat on the Board on Professional Standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association. If ever there was a member in good standing of a community of scholars that represents American psychoanalysis, it is Arnold Goldberg. Yet he writes a book that challenges the central position of organized psychoanalysis, questioning the authenticity and validity of its training procedures, its scientific publications, and its clinical theory and practice. He sees established psychoanalysis as, if not already dead and confined to a mausoleum of its own making, at least showing a senescent “creaking stiffness” (p. 147) of its joints. And he views the individual practitioner in the field as hamstrung and made excessively uncomfortable by the technical restraints required of him if he wishes to be recognized by others and to consider himself (as Goldberg ironically puts it) as an authentic member of the profession, one who upholds the standards and ideals of Freudian analysis.
“Shall we pity the poor psychoanalyst?” Goldberg is led to inquire in the first chapter of the book (p. 16). His answer is that we shall indeed, and he makes his points unrelentingly, convincingly, and with biting sarcasm and humor. Now while it is always good to ask an author, in this case an exceedingly well-established member of the