You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A 9-year-old girl in weekly treatment recently came to her session very upset that a girl at school had been cruelly making fun of her for being adopted. ‘I wish I'd never told any of the girls at school, now!’ In fact, I think she is re-creating and trying to know about a terrible experience which befell her in her first four, pre-adoptive, years, when she was recurrently molested by her father. The theme she is struggling to deal with is the awful irreversibility of the desanctification of the private, the desecration of the innermost aspects of self. This is the theme which Bollas and Sundelson chronicle in relation to psychoanalysis in this disturbing, urgent and most important book.
Setting their analysis of the loss of psychotherapeutic privacy in the United States of America, the authors provide a sober but deeply alarming account of the legislative and commercial forces which have combined over three decades seriously to undermine the most central aspect of psychoanalysis — the containment afforded by absolute confidentiality. A’ pivotal moment in this saga of third-party interests intruding into the analytic space occurred in 1976, when the parents of a murdered California University student, Sara Tarasoff, successfully sued the Regents of the University for failing to forewarn their daughter of the danger she was facing. She was murdered by another student who had been dating her and who had also been seen in psychotherapy at the Student Health Centre. The California Supreme Court's ruling on this case went down in American legal history, placing an obligation on all therapists to ‘use reasonable care to protect the intended victim’ from the prospect of violence or harm as expressed by any patient in treatment. Failure to comply with this ‘Tarasoff Rule’, as it became