ABSTRACT
Therapy is commonly funded by a third party, which means that confidential information has to be supplied in order for a service to be provided at all. If therapy borrows from the norms of friendship, the boundaries between them are blurred, and this need not be seen as a criticism. In the UK National Health Service, it is not permitted to keep private case notes, although there are times when a client will divulge something “in confidence”, not wanting it to be written down. The rights and wrongs of maintaining an impersonal distance arouses strong debate, as an article by Arnold Lazarus and a number of invited replies reveals. All professional regulators prohibit such relationships during therapy but may not condemn it after a reasonable period of time has elapsed beyond its termination.
