Secret Bearer or Secret Barer?—Countertransference and the Gossiping Therapist3

THIS PAPER EVOLVED OUT OF thoughts stimulated by Olinick's article on the gossiping analyst (1984). This was a pioneering attempt to penetrate a virtual conspiracy of silence among the therapeutic community concerning a close to universal phenomena in our field. However Olinick's paper did not specifically relate gossiping to countertransference. Consequently I am attempting to explore further the dynamics involved in the gossiping therapist, particularly as they relate to the issues of countertransference and its relationship to empathy.

I am concerned primarily with what I shall arbitrarily designate as "ethical", albeit unprofessional, gossiping that takes place without any revealing of identifying information but which seems to arise out of the therapist's need to make reference to his patients in what may be inappropriate personal or social situations, such as the cocktail party, hallways and the like. Thus I am referring to impulsive, unplanned, informal communications to a third party including other professionals about information, benign or malevolent about the patient from whom it has been learned, within the context of the professional confidential relationship, irrespective of whether the specific information may or may not be a particular secret of the patient. I refer to a triad, that of the gossiper, the gossiped to, and the gossiped of. I shall be more benevolent than the Talmud wherein gossip is described as like a three pronged tongue "… because it destroys three people; the person who says it, the person who listens to it and the person about whom it is