Editorial

In an interview conducted by Paul Roazen in the 1960s, the long-standing editor of American Imago George Wilbur noted that ‘the ethics of discretion about patients meant that much of the history of psychoanalysis would remain “buried”’. In this respect, one might have thought that the history of psychoanalysis is no different from the history of medicine or of any other discipline bound by strict codes of confidentiality. Given the stringent codes of confidentiality now imposed on historians of medicine - for instance, many archives in the UK require of researchers a blanket restriction on revealing the identities of patients for one hundred years from the time of treatment - are the periodic rows about the restrictions imposed by psychoanalytic archives (the most notorious of which is that of the Sigmund Freud Archives at the Library of Congress) anything more than the irresistible force of the impatient researcher eager to gain access to precious materials encountering the immovable object of data protection legislation and its cognates?

There are a number of good reasons why the history of psychoanalysis presents a special case, within the more general question of access to private and confidential materials that face historians, which are compounded in the sphere of medicine by the long tradition of medical confidentiality. One of them is the simple fact that psychoanalysis, unlike all other psychologies or visions of human nature, regards the most private and intimate elements of the lives of human beings as the most important for understanding their overall action and conduct. (It is probably by no means unusual for cardiologists to have access to data concerning their patients' sexual practices, but they are unlikely to recommend surgery solely on that basis or regard that data as having an especially privileged status in establishing aetiology.) The biographically oriented historian will sometimes be in search of exactly the same materials as the psychoanalys