Further Reflections on the Impact of Clinical Writing on Patients

Though it is unlikely that instituting universal guidelines will ever be possible for patient approval of the analyst's use of clinical material outside of the treatment setting, the author offers some supplementary reflections to those already available in the literature. Broadly applied informed consent guidelines would increase the distortion that already exists in our clinical literature due to self-imposed restraints by writers. Moreover, the powerful irrational forces mobilized by consent in the dyad are not easily ‘held’ by traditional applicable legal categories. Metapsychological formulations of the intrapsychic and intersubjective impact of patient participation in the writing process on individual analytic dyads are needed. Notions of privacy protection, validation, dyadic co-construction, or writing-as-containment by a third as rationales for informed consent fail to encompass the transindividual and external sources of human identity and the ineradicable lack of unity in the unconscious. Nevertheless, theoretical affinity and preferred technique may be mediating factors in positive outcomes of the consent process. Some paradigms not only accommodate more comfortably but also actively seek the intersubjective repercussions of informed consent. As an alternative or complementary viewpoint, the author offers the hypothesis that the clinical ramifications of either disguise or consent are not exclusively, nor even necessarily, concerned with what patients read about themselves, but what they assess or intuit—directly or indirectly through the material presented—of their analyst's unconscious strivings. To truly triangulate the clinical reporting project, it is wisest to consult the third ear of a colleague to assess the potential impact on patients on what might be being unconsciously transmitted by the analyst in the writing and the consent process.