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Whatever one's views may be on the intrinsic relations between clinical practice and the manifold other uses of psychoanalysis that are conventionally deemed to be “applied,” there can be no doubt that an analyst's decision to write about the treatment of a patient has an irrevocable effect. What hitherto had been a fundamentally private relationship between two people (and one that depends on oral communication) is now brought before the public in the form of a written text. By taking this step, the analyst exposes his narrative of the dialogic encounter to the inspection of all manner of readers—sometimes including his own patients.
Judy Leopold Kantrowitz's Writing about Patients is the culmination of an extremely impressive research project. Inspired by Glen Gabbard's seminal article, “Disguise or Consent?” (2000), Kantrowitz had the excellent idea of systematically surveying the attitudes of analysts toward the vexed questions of principle and practicality faced by anyone who wishes to do clinical writing. Her database comprised 141 analysts who had published clinical material in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, analytic journals in Canada, Argentina, and