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Dr. Paul Williams is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society and is associated with the Middle or Independent School of Psychoanalysis. He is a professor of psychoanalysis at Anglia Polytechnic University and a member of the Royal Anthropological Society. He was recently appointed Consultant Psychotherapist to the National Health Service, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Dr. Williams is also Joint Editor-in-Chief (with Glen Gabbard) of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Dr. Williams has written numerous articles on analysis with patients with severe psychopathology. His most recent article, “Incorporation of an Invasive Object,” appears in the most recent issue of the IJP. We interviewed Dr. Williams at his office at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in West London, on September 29, 2004.
MS First, thank you for your time. In a series of interviews for fort da, we're exploring the topic of confidentiality in psychoanalytic writing. Our first interview was with Mitchell Wilson,1 a San Francisco analyst who has a Lacanian orientation. We're hoping that a series of these informal discussions will provide different viewpoints and further readers’ thinking about the issues. I think that you're in a unique position to address this topic in that you function both as an analyst who writes and as an editor of the IJP, and you may want to identify when you are talking from one hat versus another. Having read your writings and those of David Tuckett and Glen Gabbard on this subject, it was clear that there was lot of concern about issues of confidentiality and issues of consent, and I'm wondering how alive you still find these issues.
PW Speaking as an editor, David Tuckett's editorial, the one from myself, and Glen's article in 2000 had a big effect on authors, and we receive continued requests for guidance about confidentiality. People are conce