ABSTRACT
When we think of the rule of confidentiality in a professional relationship, it is usually in terms of law and ethical conduct. This focus on codes of practice both conceals and protects the desire for a ‘safe’ relationship through which to explore private feelings and thoughts which occur in the ‘therapeutic alliance’. The prototype of this desire originates in infantile experience. Object relations theory describes this in terms of the introjections and identifications of early life: in other words, the complex interactions which take place between mother and child from the beginning and from which ultimately we develop a sense of who we are.1 The loss of that sense of who we are leads to a wish to return to this time of life, and it emerges in the growing child and also in the adult as a search for the lost objects of the infant world (Hinshelwood 1989).
