guarantee of confidentiality to a patient. Any circumstances which breach or fail to protect the privacy of communication therefore undermine the possibility of undertaking a psychoanalysis. In the Ethics Code , privacy is protected in two different and complementary ways, which correspond to the psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic approaches to confidentiality mentioned above. Part III, paragraph 3a, of the Code , which protects the confidentiality of patients’ information and documents, implicitly protects the privacy which is a necessary condition of this confidentiality. 2 Part III, paragraph 1, prohibits psychoanalysts from participating in or facilitating the violation of basic human rights, which include a right to privacy 3 . 2.7 Institutional & individual responsibilities Protecting confidentiality may have implications for individual psychoanalysts which differ from those for the IPA as an organisation. Whereas an individual IPA member may decide to put ethical considerations before legal ones, the IPA as an organisation may not always be in a position to do this. The risks of litigation may also differ significantly between the IPA as a corporate body and its individual members. Part III of the Ethics Code provides guidelines for ethical practice, but these are necessarily general in nature and individual psychoanalysts have to decide how to apply them in particular situations. Each alternative at the analyst’s disposal may be fraught with limitations and risks, and if a patient feels betrayed or manipulated the consequences can be serious: considerable anguish for the patient, negative impact on an ongoing treatment, or retroactive harm to a completed treatment. Often, the individual analyst is faced with making the best of an essentially undecidable situation, clinically and ethically. The situation is further complicated by the vigorous presence of different clinical and theoretical orientations in the psychoanalytic community, and there may be no agreement as to what is ethically appropriate or technically correct in a given situation. 2.8 Ethical versus legal considerations The ethical requirement of confidentiality in the psychoanalytic sense of the term arises primarily from within psychoanalytic practice, not from laws or ethical codes external to psychoanalysis. Although the rule of law is a hallmark of modern democratic societies, it is not fixed or infallible but subject to political, institutional, economic, and community 2 “Confidentiality is one of the foundations of psychoanalytic practice. A psychoanalyst must protect the confidentiality of patients’ information and documents.” IPA (2015) III.3a 3 “A psychoanalyst must not participate in or facilitate the violation of any individual’s basic human rights, as defined by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the IPA’s own Policy on Non-Discrimination.” IPA (2015) III.1. Article 12 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights makes explicit that everyone has a right to privacy, and to legal protection against interference with or attacks on privacy.
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