Description: This book focuses the collective attention of psychotherapists, the legal community, social scientists, and ethicists on the moral, legal, and clinical problems of confidentiality in psychotherapeutic practice. By providing timely and important interdisciplinary contributions, the book opens the way to understanding, if not resolving, the conflicting interests and values at stake in the debate on confidentiality.
Review Quotes: "Nearly every essay in the dozen that make up this collection sheds genuinely fresh light on some aspect of the "confidential relationships" referred to in the volume's title, namely, the confidential relationships between psychotherapist and patient (or client). With sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory perspectives, the contributing psychoanalysts, philosophers, and law professors engage the reader and each other in a fascinating and thought-provoking conversation on the meaning, scope, and significance of psychotherapist-patient confidentiality. ... At a time when confidential relationships (at least in North America), including but not limited to therapist-patient relationships, are under attack from the legal system, the health-care-industrial complex, and perhaps our confessional "therapeutic culture" itself, this book comes as a needed antidote - a multifaceted, multidisciplinary exploration of the value, meaning, and even the cost of confidentiality. ... nearly every essay in the book contains some fact or theoretical insight about confidential relationships - psychotherapeutic and otherwise - for which professionals and non-professionals alike will be grateful." - in: Metapsychology (online book review), 2004