The New Informants: The Betrayal of Confidentiality in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

by Christopher Bollas, David Sundelson

The practice of observing therapeutic confidentiality is so riddled with exceptions that it has all but disappeared. This book lucidly describes the disappearance of privacy, showing how the clinical effect of this loss has been destructive and how mental health professionals may respond constructively.
--The New England Journal of Medicine

The authors, a therapist and a lawyer, document the erosion of psychotherapist-patient confidentiality caused by the reporting laws, by the requirements of managed care, and by other features of the contemporary culture of disclosure. They analyze the failure of organized psychology, psychiatry, and social work to sound the alarm about such invasions, a failure especially perplexing in light of judicial sympathy for the psychotherapist-patient privilege. To the authors, psychotherapy without confidentiality is impossible. They propose important remedies for this clinical and ethical disaster.

215 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Christopher Bollas, Ph.D. is a Member of the International Psychoanalytical Association and has been practicing for over fifty years. Former Director of Education at the Austen Riggs Center he was Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Institute of Child Neuropsychiatry of the University of Rome. He is a prolific author and international lecturer.

Reviews

[Jacque Roller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though it was written for clinicians, this book will help any consumer of health services re-think confifdentiality and ask the appropriate questions for maintaining privacy in treatment.