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...

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.

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.

This book addresses boundary violations through the lens of the professional-client relationship, drawing examples of misconduct from law, medicine, religion, education and psychotherapy. The first three chapters cover the social context of the relationship, the inherent power differential that delineates the relational boundaries, and professionals’ difficulty with managing that power appropriately. Also discussed are the four characteristics of a boundary violation—a reversal of roles, a secret, a double bind, and an indulgence of professional privilege—and the damage to the client. Throughout the book, clients share their stories of violations—sometimes blatant, often subtle—in relationships. These vignettes, along with Peterson’s engaging style, transform ethics from dry, abstract, and theoretical principles to vital struggles to understand and appropriately manage power with clients.

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.

Should a therapist disclose personal information to a client, accept a client's gift, or provide a former client with a job? Is it appropriate to exchange email or text messages with clients or correspond with them on social networking websites? Some acts, such as initiating a sexual relationship with a client, are clearly prohibited, yet what about more subtle interactions, such as hugging or accepting invitations to a social event? Is maintaining a friendship with a former client or client's relative a conflict of interest that ultimately subverts the client-practitioner relationship? Frederic G. Reamer, a certified authority on professional ethics, offers a frank analysis of a range of boundary issues and their complex formulations. He confronts the ethics of intimate and sexual relationships with clients and former clients, the healthy parameters of practitioners' self-disclosure, electronic relationships with clients, the giving and receiving of gifts and favors, the bartering of services, and the unavoidable and unanticipated circumstances of social encounters and geographical proximity. With case studies addressing challenges in the mental health field, school contexts, child welfare, addiction programs, home-healthcare, elder services, and prison, rural, and military settings, Reamer offers effective, practical risk-management models that prevent problems and help balance dual relationships.