Confidentiality

The IPA Confidentiality Committee recently published a report which is available on the IPA website in five languages. In this webinar, four members of the Committee will speak about different aspects of the report. Andrew Brook will outline its overall structure, aims and guiding principles. Nahir Bonifacino will speak about confidentiality during training, and about specific issues concerning child and adolescent patients. John Churcher will speak about risks to confidentiality in the use of telecommunications, including for remote analysis and supervision. Finally, Allannah Furlong will speak about ‘informed consent’, including for the use of confidential clinical material in teaching and in publications, and about the relationship between ethics and the law in clinical practice. The report as a whole is intended to further the development of a culture of confidentiality among psychoanalytic practitioners. The Committee invites participants to read the report beforehand, which is available here. 

Andrew Brook is Treasurer of the IPA and former Chair of the IPA Confidentiality Committee. He has been President of both the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and the Canadian Philosophical Association, the only person ever to have been president of both. As well as being a psychoanalyst licensed in Canada and a member of the IPA, he is Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He has about 130 publications in psychoanalytic theory and history, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, Freud, Kant and environmental ethics. 



Nahir Bonifacino is a psychologist, member of the Uruguayan Psychoanalytical Association (APU) and Child and Adolescent Psychoanalyst. She received a scholarship from FEPAL and IPA to participate in the Research Training Programme in London 2009 and IPA grants in 2009 and 2011 for the development of interdisciplinary research entitled “Detection of withdrawal and promotion of the early interaction in the well-baby visit for reducing risk in early emotional development”. She is an invited Professor of Master Studies in Uruguay and in the University of Valencia (Spain) where she is concluding a PhD in Perinatal and Infant Psychology and Psychopathology. She was a delegate for APU at the Child and Adolescent FEPAL Committee (2015-2016) and she received the first Rebeca Grinberg Award in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis from the Madrid Psychoanalytical Society in 2017. She has been a member of the IPA Confidentiality Committee since its inception in June 2017.

John Churcher is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and lives in Manchester. After graduating in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Oxford in 1971, he worked in research at the universities of Edinburgh, Oxford and Warwick. From 1979 to 2002, he was Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Manchester, with teaching and research interests in visual perception, infant development, computer-mediated communication, and psychoanalysis. Qualifying as a psychoanalyst in 1997, he was in private practice in Manchester until he retired in 2013. From 2008 to 2010 he was Book Review Editor for the IJP and a member of its Editorial Board. With Leopoldo Bleger he edited the first English translation of José Bleger’s ‘Symbiosis and Ambiguity’ (Routledge, 2013). A member of the IPA Confidentiality Committee from its inception in June 2017, he was appointed its interim Chair in March 2019. 

Allannah Furlong is a PhD Psychologist in full time private practice, and a member as well as a former President of the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal. She is a former member of the North American Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She has written about different aspects of the frame such as missed sessions, symbolic payments in state covered healthcare, informed consent, confidentiality, and the issue of patient consent for the use of clinical material in publications and clinical presentations. She co-edited two interdisciplinary collections on confidentiality. She has also published on trauma and temporality in lovesickness and dehumanisation as a shield and defence against our helpless openness to the other. The latter essay was awarded the 2013 JAPA prize for an original or significant contribution to the psychoanalytic literature. Her most recent area of study is free will and unconscious choice. 

If you are unable to attend the live session, but would like to receive a recording, please continue to register and a recording will automatically be emailed to you after the live session has ended. 

Please note, this webinar will be in English.