Publishing: an act of intrusion and/or collaboration?

ABSTRACT

Writing and publishing have always confronted the clinician writer in the child and adolescent field with the dilemmas of confidentiality and consent. This is never more so than in our contemporary digital era, where access to publication of the intensely private can be just a tap of the finger away. This paper discusses the different kinds of clinical writing, and describes the author’s concepts of consent anxiety and writing through. The dynamics of reading or hearing others’ clinical work are described and discussed. The paper concludes that there are no simple guidelines; the clinical writer has to weigh up the risks versus the protective factors for each publication. The need to seek consent and show the patient the material may cast important light on the intersubjective nature of the therapeutic action in this new era of publication.

KEYWORDS:

• Writing
• consent
• complexity
• intersubjectivity
• digital era
• publication anxiety

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I will refer briefly to some experiences with patients and their families in this paper. Some examples are from cases where I have consent, and elsewhere I have used disguise and composites.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Davids

Jennifer Davids originally trained as a clinical psychologist, and later in child and adolescent psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at the Anna Freud Centre, where she subsequently worked for 20 years. She also worked in the NHS and then went on to do adult psychoanalytic training at the BPAS, where she is now a supervising analyst for child and adolescent psychoanalysis. She lives, writes and works in private practice in London.