The Gossiping Analyst

DEAR DR HAYLEY,

Between the writing of a paper and its being read there lie many tales, many slips. Therefore, I was impelled, on reading Dr Fonseca's letter (Vol. 9: 355–7), to re-read my paper. Often a chastening experience for a writer, I found, to begin with, that the title jarred me as unaesthetic and harsh-sounding. It did have the value of telling what the paper aimed at discussing and the cacophony, I thought, resided with 'gossiping' and not with 'psychoanalyst'. I realized further that it was here that Dr Fonseca and I parted company, for she deals with her own version of the psychoanalyst while I dealt, more or less successfully, with the analyst when he gossips.

In my opening paragraph I said that I hoped to deal with gossiping among analysts solely as an anomaly that requires explanation, setting aside matters of ethics, morality, and legality. I discussed the gossiping analyst as one who was temporarily led from dedicated confidentiality about his patients to 'talking shop' about them, using elements of his work as a paradoxical means of finding relief from tensions associated with that work as well as from stresses encountered in his extra-analytic life. In so doing he does not differ from the businessman, the bureaucrat, or any other professional. The paradox is solved with recognition that the shoptalk is a vehicle or a stage setting with a purpose other than to impart or receive substantive information or counsel. Questions of moral evaluation, I must repeat, I preferred to leave to others, my concern having been with the individual motivational psychology of these social phenomena.

The analyst–analysand relationship, pace Dr Fonseca, is in several ways a unique one, not entirely comparable to others. For one thing, it must be under constant scrutiny, increasingly by the patient as the analysis progresses, and of course by the analyst, who is monitored by his own work ego. This is the more sophisticated, practiced counterpart to the patient'