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We continue the series on the therapeutic relationship with Aleksandar Dimitrijevic addressing the topic of boundary violations, as requested by our patrons.
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Psychoanalysis should be free! From this motto, we're looking at making the insights of more than a century of psychoanalytic understanding available to everyone and everywhere.
Psychoanalysis should be free! From this motto, we're looking at making the insights of more than a century of psychoanalytic understanding available to anyone and everywhere. Our first goal is to produce a package of general introduction videos about psychoanalysis as well as to explain its key concepts.
Support us through our Patreon page! https://www.patreon.com/berlinpsychoanalytic
There were and are significant problems with therapeutic relations. Going to either of the extremes one where endless tend to be completely absent from it so that the relationship is too impersonal and psychoanalysis has been criticized for this, the classical psychoanalytic mobile most. And then the opposite problem is a psycho and is being too much involved or as this is called in contemporary secondary literature.
Boundary violations in psychoanalysis. This is something that also has been described very often in popular literature, culture in movies and elsewhere and ranges from, uh, too much support in a way that is too friendly, almost, uh, parental. To asking patients or demanding of patients to do something for the analyst, be it financial or actually some form of activity and to what is most frequently discussed sexual boundary violations.
The problem became very obvious to Freud very early around the year, 1912. When both of his most trusted collaborators, Carl was too young, but that moment was the president of the international psychoanalytic association and Shanda Farron, who Freud wanted as a sun dog. Fred wanted his daughter Matilda to marry for currency both young and fair enough.
He got involved with female patients, uh, inferences case at least briefly. Uh, head over heels in love with, uh, one of his patients and in use case possibly even a series of affairs that lasted for years and decades later. And it seems to me very well documented that one of the patients then used to live in the same house where young in his wife.
Freud's reaction to this, given that Freud was as a person, um, very prudish, extremely strict with his himself, completely focused on ambition. Success in such stuff was that he tried to prevent this from ever happening. And his famous technical papers written in these years, 19 12, 19 16, 17 are very conservative and he confessed that he intentionally wrote them is very conservative fashion.
So as to prevent this from happening, my impression is that Freud is not so much concerned. That patients are suffering or they were abused or they have completely lost hope into the possibility of overcoming their problems. But that fraud is more concerned for the reputation of psychoanalysis because this time psychoanalysts in 1910, there were 50 psycho less present at the conference where they founded the international, the world of the university.
Didn't accept psychoanalysis to go to psychiatry, didn't accept psychoanalysis. It was generally accused of being a Jewish science. So in a way for it felt isolated. And he felt if people start thinking of psychoanalysis as a place where doctors put young female patients on the couch until they fall in love with them and they can have affairs with them that the movement that discipline would be completely.
The technical papers, words to a large extent to make psychoanalysis of the coming decades. Very rigid to the level of many analysts around the globe. Not saying good morning, not saying have a nice weekend. No. Communicating or sharing anything with the patient outside of the 45 or 50 minutes.
Unfortunately, this did not work as a good prevention of the problem because as always going to another extreme does not solve problems and sexual boundary violations in the world of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy still exist and have always existed.
A large study conducted in the early 1990s, where psychotherapists from the United States and Canada were interviewed, not psychoanalysts only showed that between 19 and 12% of them admit having had romantic or sexual relationships with actions. We can not know the real number because. Uh, not everyone admits as in every other situation.
And then in the 1990s and the beginning of the first decade of this century, more research on this problem started a problem in the groundbreaking work was done by Glenn Gabbert. I think in 2003, he published the first book with the title of boundaries and boundary violations in psychoanalysis and various institutes then started.
Developing ethic codes, ethic commissions in a better way than before. Patients were encouraged to file complaints and similar stuff.
There is a long history. Unfortunately also all psychoanalysts having strange financial arrangements with their patients, Gabbert described. The case over in Jones, who gave one of his patients advice, how to invest money in the stock exchange and when the patient, and this happened in the session. And when the patient earned a lot of money, Jones wanted to share, he wanted to present it.
And similar things were going on with people, charging for supervisions, some unbelievably high amounts of money. Or similar stuff, unfortunately, still taking place today on a, on a less malignant side is the situation of many analysts who care about their patients beyond the limits of what's professional.
Let me just mention, for instance, that several of his child patients lived in Winnicott's house for a certain amount of time. And that freedom from Reichman didn't have a single friend in the last years of her life. So she would take patients to concerts, theater performances, and such though, not as malignant yet unprofessional, not for the benefit of the patient.
Wouldn't help the patient recover and feel better.