ABSTRACT
The freedom of psychoanalysts to formulate psychoanalytic questions is fundamental to the entire enterprise. Can that freedom be appropriately exercised on material that is in the public realm? The problem arises when a particular kind of information enters the public realm. It happens sometimes that information about psychoanalytic treatment becomes known sometimes in more circuitous ways. Case material comes in many forms. When it is one’s own analytic patients, of course one is bound by confidentiality. The contemporary focus on interaction within the psychoanalytic setting that has so significantly enlarged people sense of the usable data is an outgrowth of the movement of countertransference from taboo to centrality. Once taboo by virtue of being understood as an obstacle to treatment, it is widely, if not universally, believed to one of the analyst’s subtlest psychoanalytic tools. Other taboos successfully broken include such innovations as group treatment, treatment of psychotics, use of the chair rather than the couch, vacation periods interrupting treatment.
