ABSTRACT
Extremely curious and intelligent, Alex, who is a twenty-seven year-old veterinarian student, has a traumatic history of sexual abuse and suffered the loss of his only sibling to suicide when she was nineteen. He has identified as gay since early adolescence. Even after a fair amount of encouragement Alex remained secretive about the bad thing, though he stated feeling guilty and concerned about how angry he thought the author would be. In retrospect, given the intersubjectivity of our pairing Alex's violation of the author’s personal space was inevitable. Alex's extra-analytic incursion helped the author to see more of the wisdom in taking a risk and sometimes disclosing personal information to a patient. Clearly the terrain of relational thinking regarding the judicious disclosure of psychoanalysts’ own subjectivity and personhood is shifting and being challenged even if it is in ways that they fear leads to greater ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity.
