Book Review Editorial: Secrets

Received: 28 September 2025 | Revised: 28 September 2025 | Accepted: 29 September 2025

In Freud 1901, Freud declared that “no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore” (71). Curiously, it took another 50 years, to be precise, for the first psychoanalytic paper on secrets (Gross 1951) to appear. He noted that secret keeping is invariably associated with the contradictory wishes to retain and reveal the sequestered, private mental content. Gross traced the tendency to create and maintain secrets to the oedipal phase during which the child is preoccupied with desires to pry open the secrets of parental sexuality. Following this, Sulzberger (1953) described gender differences in this realm, noting that men are more likely to reveal their own secrets whereas women are prone to reveal others' secrets. Margolis (1966, 1974) extended these ideas and, adding his own perspective, elucidated the technical handling of secrets in the course of analytic treatment. More recently, Khan (1983) referred to a secret/s as a potential space and I called it “an intrapsychic cul-de-sac which not only disrupts life's experiential continuity but mobilizes defensive processes to guard its own existence (Akhtar 1985, 82). An important contribution was also made by Celenza (2007) by underscoring how analytic confidentiality can deteriorate into ”hyper-confidentiality“ and secrecy which, in turn, prepare grounds for boundary violation.

This breathless recounting of psychoanalytic literature on secrets is a lexical welcoming doormat to welcome the powerful and significant new book on this topic by the highly respected Oregon-based psychoanalyst, Kathryn Zerbe. Having contributed two acclaimed monographs on eating disorders (Zerbe 1993, 2008), the esteemed clinician-theorist has turned her attention to secrets and their psychosomatic and relational vicissitudes. This literary and clinical gem is reviewed here by Natha