The Difficulty of Dealing with Deviance: An illustrative case study

Abstract

A case study is described where an individual who engaged in bizarre sexually aberrant behaviour was treated unsuccessfully on an outpatient basis for over a year. This case highlights some of the difficulties that are associated with this type of clinical work, e.g. legal involvement and its effect on the therapeutic relationship, heavy reliance on patient self-report, problems in predicting future behaviour, or lack of empirically based treatment guidelines, etc. These issues are discussed in relation to the problem of trying to help such individuals.