Cultivating a Culture of Concern Regarding Confidentiality in Writing About Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis

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Notes

1. The question as to what, if anything, patients who were in analysis during their childhood or adolescence remember of their treatments is an important and interesting one. Midgley (2012) writes about Peter Heller’s adult recollections of his childhood analysis with Anna Freud, published after she sent him notes from their work. Luepnitz (2017) interviewed Winnicott’s “The Piggle,” after the former-patient-now-adult contacted her. She did not remember the treatment with the exception of one session about which she felt guilty for having killed Winnicott with a rolling pin in fantasy. When she heard a CD of Winnicott giving a BBC lecture, his distinctive voice was not familiar to her. One of us treated a patient in latency and adolescence who as an adult reached out with questions about why the parents insisted on treatment. The patient had little memory of the analysis and when given the opportunity to read something the analyst had written about the treatment, did not recognize themselves as the patient described. Additional anecdotal information and research on this topic is needed to validate or dispute our hypotheses about the effects of amnesia.

2. Stephen Seligman, former Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues; Francis Grier, Editor of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis; Denia Barrett, Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child; David Tuckett, CEO of Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing; and Adam Burbage, Global Head of Portfolio in the Behavioural Sciences at Taylor & Francis.