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Studies indicate that as many as 10% of male psychotherapists will become sexually involved with their patients, and, of these, 80% will do so more than once (Brodsky, 1989). While all mental health professions condemn this behavior as exploitative of the patient, rarely do colleagues take the steps necessary to stop it (Hare-Mustin, 1992). As a result, sexual abuse is a leading cause of malpractice claims against psychotherapists (Perr, 1989).
In Sexual Involvement with Therapists, Kenneth Pope contends that many of the same attitudes and beliefs that lead to therapist-patient sexual abuse are also responsible for the professional silence surrounding the abuse, and may lead to ineffective or harmful treatment of these patients when they subsequently seek help. Pope proffers as a searing but paradigmatic example Freud's response to the sexual exploitations committed by his students and colleagues Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi. Identifying with his fellow male analysts and intent on protecting them as well as the profession as a whole, Freud excused and minimized the analysts' behavior while disbelieving, blaming, and deceiving the women patients who came to him for help.
Examining these attitudes and beliefs is a central task of the book, and Pope begins by focusing on the historical, cultural, and professional contexts in which they occur. He identifies primarily four: gender (mostly male therapists abuse mostly female patients), parallels to incest (the therapist-patient relationship is, through the transference, primarily parental), the scope of the problem (like incest and rape, the extent of the abuse was until recently often denied), and the profession's self-exemption from normal standards of accountability, integrity, and trust (which Pope seems to attribute largely to a tendency toward narcissism in mental health professionals).
Against the backdrop of these contextual factors, Pope examines clinical issues that arise in treatment with sexually exploited pa