Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Milton Horowitz stated that sharing a secret is not necessarily pathogenic. The pathogenic factor is shared guilt. He suggested that "the sharing of a guilty secret makes every auditor an accomplice" and that the bearer of a secret often repeats the circumstances in the next generation. He noted that shared secrets enforce some loyalties, divide others. The analytic situation and the basic rule impose a conflict of loyalties on the analysand, who is the bearer of a secret. To keep a secret is often a way of holding onto old object ties, as well as keeping one's honor. To tell all to the analyst may be to unconsciously make the analyst an accomplice. Dr. Horowitz stated that analysands do not often simply reveal a family secret: the secrets may appear as disguised derivatives in dreams or as acting out. This is especially true for shared family secrets learned early in the child's life. Dr. Horowitz also noted how the secret tends to be sequestered from the associative connections in the analysis and may limit its effectiveness. Dr. Milton Jucovy discussed some additional groups of patients in whom secrets or family myths occur with great regularity. Adopted children comprise one such group. Another is the second generation of survivors of the Holocaust. Dr. Jucovy reported that because survivors do not often tell about their experiences, "offspring develop their own fantasies which may be pathological variants of the family romance theme." He cautioned that the pact of silence in the family may continue in the treatment situation, and this should be borne in mind by the analyst. Finally, Dr. Jucovy presented two interesting clinical illustrations in which the family secret concerned events prior to the birth of the patient or before the patient had sufficient cognitive ability to register it. He noted that failure to uncover the secrets may result in an incomplete or unsatisfactory analytic process.