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Unfortunately, observations that some colleagues of high professional caliber talk about their patients and reveal their identity, unaware of what they are doing, are not rare. Analysts mention these facts privately, and lament them. It is Dr. Wahl's merit to make them a public concern and to offer and invite analytic investigation of the specific hazards that attend the analysis of privileged patients.
My own experience with “name-dropping” indiscretion started many years ago. The analyst concerned was far senior to me in experience and position, and my first reaction was of surprise. The obvious motive, however, was neither a boast nor a reflected-glory identification with the patient, who was an important and influential man. Instead, the analyst stated plainly the difficulties she had encountered in this analysis. She complained about the patient, but still more about herself. Her communication was, in fact, an appeal for help—again, very surprisingly, considering the difference in our working experience. What was clear to me was that the analyst was struggling with unresolved countertransference problems, and this observation was one of many that led me to explore more carefully the phenomenon of the countertransference and realize its function as a cognitive tool, provided the analyst “recognizes and masters” the difficulties it can cause—as Freud (1937) in his only-too-brief comments on the countertransference demands.
When later I not infrequently met the kind of indiscretion which Dr. Wahl describes, I felt ill at ease and irritated in that special way one does when put in the position of accomplice to an action of which one disapproves. I reacted with a kind of resigned acceptance of just one more example of human weakness, but—in constrast to Dr. Wahl—I failed to mobilize scientific curiosity.
I welcome the opportunity to make up for that failure now.
Dr. Wahl suggests that in an otherwise thorough and successful training analysis some areas were not suff