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Judy Kantrowitz is a noted clinician and an important, productive voice for clinical analytic research. We are fortunate to have in our midst analysts with such rich research backgrounds. Earlier works from her pen include an investigation of the patient-analyst “match” (1986) and a book-length study of “the patient's impact on the analyst” (1996). Her current book is a major inquiry into how analysts who write about their clinical work decide whether to simply disguise their patients' identity or, in addition, to ask for their permission to write about them. Kantrowitz focuses on the analyst's awareness of the intrinsic struggle between his own interest in writing and the interests of the patient and of the analysis. This attention to a variety of conflicts and dilemmas for writers makes the book useful to a wide audience. While only a minority of analysts write about their patients for publication, all analysts communicate at some time about their patients and face similar struggles about confidentiality when they write or speak about their work in seminars, supervision, and case reports during training, and later on in study groups, private consultations, or wider presentations.
Kantrowitz questioned three groups of analysts (N = 141) by phone or e-mail whose training and theoretical orientations were assumed to be characterized by the orientations of the journals in which they published: a more traditional North American journal (JAPA); international journals, including the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP); and a more relational journal, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. The analysts' clinical material had been published during a five-year period (1995-2000). Another group, who published in JAPA and IJP during an earlier period (1977-1981), were interviewed to study possible changes over time. The analysts were asked a large number of questions about their attitudes and practices in regard to writing about