ABSTRACT
Robert Galatzer-Levy is widely recognized both as a clinician and as a researcher. He has written extensively on scientific theories and methodologies in relation to psychoanalytic theory and practice. This chapter provides an incisive analysis of the reciprocal ethical implications of psychoanalytic research, a growing and diverse field, and confidentiality. Though the ethical dilemmas of clinical research have long been recognized, rapid developments in therapeutic technique, research methods, and communications technology have pushed these dilemmas to the forefront of the ethics debate within psychoanalysis. Galatzer-Levy's contribution questions to what extent the problem of confidentiality itself is amenable to scientific inquiry.
Whereas before I was accused of giving no information about my patients, now I shall be accused of giving information about my patients which ought not to be given? I can only hope that in both cases the critics will be the same, and that they will merely have shifted the pretext for their reproaches; if so, I can resign in advance any possibility of ever removing their objections [Freud, 1905, p. 7].
