ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the position of the deep unconscious system on the several ground rules and explains why the invaluable safeguards are so often ignored and violated. Total confidentiality provides a closed and protected setting and container for the patient’s conscious and unconscious revelations. While, in general, total privacy and total confidentiality go hand in hand, they tend to stress somewhat different aspects of the ground rules of psychotherapy. Trigger decoding patients’ material in light of adaptation-evoking interventions by therapists reveal that, on the level of deep unconscious experience, patients are highly perceptive and remarkably creative and effective in utilizing their adaptive resources. For patients, therapists’ violations of total confidentiality will be experienced unconsciously as betrayals, inappropriate exposures, breaches of trust, self-serving and exploitative acts, abuses of and assaults on the patient, sexual abuse, and the like. Total privacy and total confidentiality are aspects of the secured frame that every patient deserves to have as basic conditions for therapy.
