Discussion

In 1939 before he became a successful artist, Jackson Pollock was hospitalized for alcoholism and began psychiatric treatment with Joseph Henderson, M.D. During his treatment, which ended when Henderson moved to California in 1940, Pollock gave him a series of drawings that Henderson kept. Henderson, more than 10 years after Pollock's death in 1955, sold the drawings, which were published in 1970. Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, herself an artist, brought suit against Henderson to prevent their publication, citing Henderson's legal and ethical responsibility to maintain Pollock's confidentiality. “I don't feel,” she said, “I can place myself in the position of saying that any Pollock cannot be shown — I'm not trying to hold back work on Pollock. On the other hand I do feel there is a violation of privacy here. I just assume that anything that goes on between analyst and patient is private — about as private as a confessional” (Medical World News, 1971, p. 18). In the lawsuit, Henderson argued that the drawings were treated as art and were unrelated to Pollock's psychotherapy. However, in his monograph Jackson Pollock: Psycho-analytic Drawings, Claude Cernuschi (1992) argues that although Henderson initially said that he had requested that Pollock bring the drawings to facilitate the therapy, he later “made specific attempts to dissociate the drawings from the analytic sessions and thus justify their sale without having violated his patient's privacy” (p. 7). Pollock's wife ultimately lost her suit and the drawings were published and displayed. Were the drawings art and unrelated to therapy? Were they therapeutic communications? To what degree was their release regulated legally, and what was Henderson's ethical obligation to his former patient?

Although Joseph Henderson's sale of Jackson Pollock's drawings raises different issues from Martin Orne's release of the tapes of Anne Sexton's therapy, the two cases highlight the fact that a