ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses exclusively on the fate of the analyst's anonymity in contemporary times and its impact on the transference specifically. Whatever clinicians' professional beliefs about the importance of anonymity for the analytic process they cannot in any way limit their patients' access to information about them. The chapter argues that for the disturbed patients this easy, immediate access to information about the therapist, thereby bypassing the anonymity of the therapist that psychoanalysis has regarded as so vital to the analytic relationship, can precipitate severe forms of acting out. It considers, however, the way in which for some patients 'data' can be understood as a very modern type of 'transitional object' and argues that this use of data lends itself more readily to being analysed. By reducing the gap between fantasy and action new technologies, as they intersect with the transference relationship, pose new risks for analytic work with some patients, particularly those who have borderline, narcissistic and perverse features.
