Preceded by Boundaries and boundary violations in psychoanalysis / Glen O. Gabbard, Eva P. Lester. New York: BasicBooks, c1995.

This book addresses training, supervisory, and therapeutic issues related to the consequences from sexual boundary violations among mental health professionals and clergy. These problems are discussed on theoretical and practical levels aimed at understanding, recovery, rehabi...

This book explains how sexual boundary violations occur in psychotherapy, how to avoid them, and how such violations affect clients, therapists, colleagues, institutions, and families.

What do you do when you run into a patient in a public place? How do you respond when a patient suddenly hugs you at the end of a session? Do you accept a gift that a patient brings to make up for causing you some inconvenience? Questions like these—which virtually all clinicians face at one time or another—have serious clinical, ethical, and legal implications. This authoritative, practical book uses compelling case vignettes to show how a wide range of boundary questions arise and can be responsibly resolved as part of the process of therapy. Coverage includes role reversal, gifts, self-disclosure, out-of-office encounters, physical contact, and sexual misconduct. Strategies for preventing boundary violations and managing associated legal risks are highlighted.

Across the lifespan we may experience moments of sublime intimacy, suffocating closeness, comfortable solitude, and intolerable distance or closeness. In Interpersonal Boundaries: Variations and Violations Salman Akhtar and the other contributors demonstrate how boundaries, by delineating and containing the self, secure one's conscious and unconscious experience of entity and of self-governance. Interpersonal Boundaries reveals the complexities of the self and its boundaries, while identifying some of the enigmatic questions about how the biological, psychological, and cultural aspects of the self interrelate. The contributors skillfully integrate a wide range of theory with a wealth of clinical material. Examples range from the dark side of boundary-violating therapists to an extraordinary presentation of harrowing analytic work with a severely traumatized man. Readers will find that this volume makes a significant contribution to the knowledge of boundaries of the self in psychotherapeutic theory and practice.

Inspired by the clinical and ethical contributions of Muriel Dimen (1942-2016), a prominent feminist anthropologist and relational psychoanalyst, Sexual Boundary Trouble in Psychoanalysis challenges the established psychoanalytic and mental health consensus about the sources and appropriate management of sexual boundary violations (SBVs). Gathering contributions from an exciting range of analysts working at the cutting edge of the field, this book shatters normative professional guidelines by focusing on the complicity and hypocrisy of professional groups, while at the same time raising for the first time the taboo subject of the ordinary practicing clinician’s unconscious professional ambivalence and potentially "rogue" sexual subjectivity. Sexual Boundary Trouble in Psychoanalysis uncovers the roots of SBV in the institutional origins and history of psychoanalysis as a profession. Exploring Dimen’s concept of the psychoanalytic "primal crime," which is in some ways constitutive of the profession, and the inherently unstable nature of interpersonal and professional "boundaries," Sexual Boundary Trouble in Psychoanalysis breaks new ground in the continuing struggle of psychoanalysis to reconcile itself with its liminal social status and morally ambiguous practice. It will appeal to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Inspired by the clinical and ethical contributions of Muriel Dimen, Social Aspects of Sexual Boundary Trouble goes beyond the established consensus that sexual boundary violations (SBV) constitute a serious breach of professional ethics, in order to explore the cultural and historical implications of their chronic persistence. In Rotten Apples and Ambivalence, her last major publication, Dimen (2016) maintained that "the phenomenon of sexual transgression between analyst and patient . . . is insufficiently addressed so long as it is only deemed psychological." In responding to and developing Dimen’s argument, the distinguished contributors to this volume bring the discussion of SBV to a new level of ethical rigor and depth, challenging the psychoanalytic profession to go beyond its codified complacency. This collection shatters normative professional guidelines by focusing on the complicity and hypocrisy of professional groups, while at the same time raising the taboo subject of the ordinary practicing clinician’s unconscious professional ambivalence and potentially "rogue" sexual subjectivity. Social Aspects of Sexual Boundary Trouble uncovers the roots of SBV in the institutional origins and history of psychoanalysis as a profession. Exploring Dimen’s concept of the psychoanalytic "primal crime," which is in some ways constitutive of the profession, and the inherently unstable nature of interpersonal and professional "boundaries," Social Aspects of Sexual Boundary Trouble breaks new ground in the continuing struggle of psychoanalysis to reconcile itself with its liminal social status and its origins as a subversive, morally ambiguous practice. It will be highly relevant to specialists in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, critical theory, feminist studies and social thought.