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Barbara Pizer, in her wonderfully explicit and scrupulous unpacking of a disclosure, directs us to a place of contemplative reflection and self-scrutiny as we consider choices made and not made in our own struggles with ourselves and those we seek to help within the inevitably fateful mix of subjectivities unleashed in the crucible of our work.
In keeping with her other papers that directly or indirectly address the still contentious matter of analytic disclosures, Barbara once again draws our attention to the multiple dimensions of this issue and its embeddedness in the analyst's use of self. More specifically, this paper focuses on a disclosure that not only reveals personal information, it simultaneously divulges Barbara's confidential relationship with another. Certainly such a boundary crossing gives us serious pause for thought. Yet, Barbara, in daring to go where others seldom do, invites us to reconsider ourselves in terms of those “hot” moments of intimate encounter, those moments where aspects of ourselves feel so on the line that we find ourselves responding in ways we could never have imagined, let alone anticipated. Yet these are the very moments that often offer us our best chance at making a difference. In some way or other, we are both knowingly and unknowingly swept up by and thrust into these moments. But we have to be open to them—to recognize and be able to surrender to the moment that confronts us. These are the moments that tempt us to turn away, the quicksilver but complex moments demanding that we exercise the restraints of analytic responsibility while simultaneously inviting us toward freedom of imagination and curious engagement.
In what we have come to recognize as Barbara's forthright and openly sharing way, she details her revealing to her patient, Kate, that Kate's ailing analyst, Ariel, had at a much earlier time been Barbara's analysand. She chooses to do so, to the extent that one can ever deliberately choose,