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In this book, Paul W. Mosher and Jeffrey Berman have written an important, useful examination of a major issue in contemporary ethics in psychotherapy: confidentiality and privacy. In 11 chapters, they offer a comprehensive exploration of the nature of ethical dimensions of confidentiality and privacy, with carefully researched, diverse examples of violations of this essential component of psychotherapeutic ethical behavior.
Merely scanning the chapter headings, the reader can discover a range of well-known, important instances of breaches of confidentiality and privacy, as well as some lesser known ones, such as the Supreme Court ruling in Jaffee vs. Redmond; the Tarasoff case, the Anne Sexton controversy, and the Philip Roth controversy.
After reading the first three engrossing chapters, I was immediately captured by Chapter 4, “‘The Angry Act’: The Psychoanalyst's Breach of Confidentiality in Philip Roth's Life and Art” (pp. 63-81), and then, by Chapter 5, “Angry Acts and Counteracts in Philip Roth's Life and Art” (pp. 82-104), 40 pages of the 343 page book, because years previously I had read Jeffrey Berman's account of this episode in his The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis (Berman, 1985), while I was a psychoanalytic candidate at the Training Institute of NPAP, and an ardent fan of Philip Roth's novels. Since I also am a writer, and looked forward to publishing psychoanalytic articles “some day,” I was intrigued by both the ethics of the situation and the perils of a fiction writer who is in analysis with someone who might publish something that could reveal the writer/analysand's identity. I knew my analyst would not do so, but it still was an intriguing situation. In this more recent book, Mosher and Berman explore the problem further. Each chapter begins with a “study guide” statement, “What to look for.” This “What to look for” begins, “What are the risks when a psychotherapist publishes highly personal and potentially embarrassing i