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.
For more than 2,000 years, the Hippocratic Oath has guided the ethical practice of medicine. Physicians swear to “abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous…and further from the seduction of females and males…. [we] will not divulge…[that which] should be kept secret.” These proscriptions make clear that the perils of sexual as well as nonsexual boundary violations have been known to physicians throughout the recorded history of medicine. In Boundaries and Boundary Violations in Psychoanalysis, Drs. Gabbard and Lester explore this complex and controversial subject with candor and honesty.
The book is divided into 10 chapters. The first four focus on the theoretical and clinical evolution of the understanding of boundaries in psychoanalysis. These four chapters are encyclopedic in breadth and trace the development of the psychoanalytic concept of boundaries from Freud's early conceptualizations of boundaries between systems within the mental apparatus; then, following the elaboration of the structural theory, boundaries between ego and nonego in the tripartite structure; and boundaries between the ego and the external world. Gabbard and Lester describe three phases in the evolution of the concept of boundaries in psychoanalytic thinking, each phase corresponding to theoretical shifts within psychoanalysis. The first phase after Freud's contributions included