Description: This book examines informed consent to psychoanalysis. It reviews the law. It examines informed consent as a theoretical matter: e.g., is it possible, is it countertherapeutic? It reports on a survey of analysts. The goal is to shed psychoanalytic light on a concept which has changed the delivery of healthcare.
Brief description: Elyn Saks is Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law; Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine; on the faculty of the New Center for Psychoanalysis; and Director of the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics. She is author of The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (Hyperion 2007) and a MacArthur Fellow.
Review Quotes: An important and well-designed study. Saks and Golshan have described a new, uncharted field of inquiry: how standards of 'informed consent' might bear on -- and matter within -- psychoanalytic treatment. Their book intelligently frames a variety of new practical questions.-----Martin Stone, Cardozo Law School