Confidentiality

Ethical Perspectives and Clinical Dilemmas

Charles D. Levin, Allanah Furlong, Mary Kay O'Neil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138005679
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317771043
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Medical Law
• Index: Psychology

The distinguished contributors to Confidentiality probe the ethical, legal, and clinical implications of a deceptively simple proposition: Psychoanalytic treatment requires a confidential relationship between analyst and analysand. But how, they ask, should we understand confidentiality in a psychoanalytically meaningful way? Is confidentiality a therapeutic requisite of psychoanalysis, an ethical precept independent of psychoanalytic principles, or simply a legal accommodation with the powers that be?

In wrestling with these questions, the contributors to Confidentiality are responding to a professional, ethical, and political crisis in the field of mental health. Psychotherapy - especially long-term psychotherapy in its psychoanalytic variants - has been undermined by an erosion of personal privacy that has become part of our cultural zeitgeist. The heightened demand for public transparency has forced caregivers from all walks of professional life to submit to increasing bureaucratic regulation.

For the contributors to this collection, the need for confidentiality is centrally involved in the relationship of the psychotherapeutic professions both to society and to the law. No less importantly, the requirement of confidentiality brings a clarifying perspective to debates within the psychotherapeutic literature about the relationship of theory to practice. It thereby provides a framework for shaping a set of ethical principles specifically adapted to the psychotherapeutic, and especially to the psychoanalytic, relationship.

Linking general issues of privacy to the intimate details of psychotherapeutic encounter, Confidentiality will serve as a basic guide to a wide range of professionals, including lawyers, social scientists, philosophers, and, of course, psychotherapists. Therapy patients, policy makers, and the wider public will also find it instructive to know more about the special protected conditions under which one can better come to "know thyself."

Index

[Numerals followed by “n” indicate note.]

A.A. Brill Archives and Special Collections, 133

absolute confidentiality, 61–63

abstinence, 68

of analysts, 19

rule of, 25

abuse

correcting, 214

forms of, 215

action

principles and, 197–198

in the real, 26

Adler, A., 142

Administrative Simplification, 243

adolescence, developmental jump in, 33

affidavit, 175

of insurance company, 176

therapist’s, 177

AG v. Guardian Newspapers, 297n

AIDS-HIV status, 244

Alexander, F., on Chicago criminals, 22

alpha function, Bion on, 158–160, 160n

altered state of consciousness, 159

AMA. See American Medical Association

ambiguity, confidentiality and, x

American Bar Association, 205

American Imago, The (Kleinschmidt), 90

American Medical Association (AMA), 231, 235n

American Psychiatric Association (APA), 231, 234

American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), 96, 96n, 203, 234–235, 252

Amici brief by, 21, 229

Committee on Scientific Activities, 91–93

ethics code, 236, 236n

Ethics Committee of, 186–187

ethics complaint with, 186

History and Archives Committee, 133

intervention on patient privacy, 251

Practice Bulletins, 131

size of, 205

white papers on privacy, 253

American Psychological Association, 96

Amin v. Rose, 237–238n

analysands

awareness that analysts might write about them, 90

stories of, 9

analysis, purpose of, 9

analysts

patient access to notes of, 12...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Contributors
• Section 1 Thinking about Confidentiality
• Section 2 Dilemmas in Treatment, Research, and Training
• Section 3 Clinical Practice Introduction to Section Three
• Section 4 Professional Ethics and the Law
• Epilogue
• Index