ABSTRACT
The issue of self-revelation has been a complicated one for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists who traditionally have shown great ambivalence about disclosing aspects of their personal life. Freud’s (1912) characterization of the psychoanalyst as a “blank screen” set the stage for generations of analysts who upheld anonymity and neutrality as an ideal, despite the fact that Freud himself did not practice what he preached. 1 He was hardly a blank screen to his daughter Anna when he set out to analyze her in 1918 and his penchant for drawing on his personal experiences and those of family members were evident from his writings (Boulanger, 2007).
