In The New Informants: The Betrayal of Confidentiality in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Bollas and Sundelson (1995) provide an explanation in Chapter Four, Creating Informants, of the various social, medical, economic, and legal forces that have virtually made psychotherapists informants and have robbed them of the therapist-client privilege of confidentiality. As the authors write, ôThe present trend in the destruction of privilegeùand its ultimately devastating effect on the practice of psychoanalysisùis gloomy indeedö (Bollas, & Sundelson, 1995, p. 152). This critique will review the elements discussed by the authors in Chapter Four as a means of demonstrating why they find this trend gloomy and how this trend has arisen in contemporary society.
The erosion of the privilege of confidentiality and the transformation of psychotherapists into informants originated in American society during the 1960s, when the work of the KempesÆ destroyed the notion that ôàchild abuse was negligible,ö (Bollas, & Sundelson, 1995, p. 109). Even the authors maintain that it was ôingenuousö as a social policy to turn psychotherapists into mandatory informants to help deal with the social ill of child abuse. However, the authors contend that this trend occurred due to a collective and national guilt over the abandonment of AmericaÆs children to empty homes and even the guilt and outrage over the meaningless deaths of hundreds of thousands of youths in Vietnam. This posited the psychotherapist in the position of helping to ôrecover and restore the missing selfö that became a ônational obsessionö (Bollas, & Sundelson, 1995, p. 111). Within the social phenomenon of child abuse, both patient and therapist aimed at identifying the source of the abuse, the parent. As such, the authors contend that ôàbreaches of confidentiality were actively sought by both therapist and patientö (Bollas, & Sundelson, 1995, p. 113).
During th...