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RECENTLY ON THREE SEPARATE occasions during conversation with colleagues I was astonished to hear from them inappropriate disclosures of patient identification or material. It was all the more surprising since I knew each of them to be excellent clinicians, experienced, conscientious men who took very seriously their Hippocratic responsibilities to patients. None of them seemed to be aware of the inappropriateness of their communication and, more significantly, in each instance the indiscreet communication related to a person of celebrity or influence.
This set me to thinking about the analysis of the rich, the famous, and the influential and to considering some of the special features that can often characterize the analysis of such patients and of the transference and the counter-transference that can be evoked therein. Since parenthetically it had always been a longstanding clinical impression of mine that many more patients in these three categories had had incomplete, ineffective, or unsatisfactory analytic experiences than is encountered in any other category of patient.
I remember some years ago being told by a patient of celebrity who had been unsuccessful in two previous therapeutic efforts, "Both of the doctors were more like friends than doctors. They fawned on me, seemed to want to know me as a friend and one of them even asked me for an autograph for his daughter." As this third analysis progressed, it became clear that one of the reasons