Topics: Boundary Violations as Hypocrisy

The Hypocrisy of Boundary Violations
(Extract from a lecture May 2006)

Cases of boundary violations are almost always problematic in two ways.  First, they represent instances in which a therapeutic undertaking turns malignant, an outcome that creates consternation and rightly horrifies therapists and the community in which they work.  Second, such cases regularly pose enormous problems of management, partly out of the need to protect the patient, partly out of the difficulty in establishing facts, but, also because of the emotions that boundary violations arouse in everyone. These emotions are linked to the taboos and fantasies of early childhood development, from which they derive great psychological power.

In this presentation I want to offer a view of boundary violations as acts of hypocrisy. To do so, I must begin with some attention to hypocrisy, itself. In this extract, that extensive part is omitted, but the reader is referred to my earlier paper on the lure of hypocrisy from which it was taken (see JAPA 53/1:2005, pp. 7-22).

If you have followed this complicated discourse, you may still be wondering why it may be useful to view boundary violations as acts of hypocrisy.  Here is what I have in mind:  It directs attention to the commitment of analysts to their patients’ welfare.  It makes clear that however much the patient may desire or press for boundary violations, the boundary violation—a breach of trust—is the responsibility of the analyst.  It challenges analysts to redouble their efforts to understand and master idealization and transference of developmentally early trust, as they pull for action in analysis.  In considering whether analysts who commit boundary violations can be rehabilitated, it directs attention to the problem of deception, the abandonment of principle, and the failure to hold to the ordinary analytic commitment to the welfare of the patient.  It focuses on the patient’s urgent need for assistance in separating from an idealized, destructive analyst, under conditions that are regularly traumatic and burdened by transference of early trust without sufficient self-protection.  And, finally, it promotes appreciation, by analysts and by the community, of the ambivalent attitudes that we all share in regard to hypocrisy.  The difficulties of confronting the truth, even after the fact, not only for the analytic pair but for the analytic community, parallel the reactions to hypocrisy in political life, to which all of us are susceptible.

Anton O. Kris, M.D.

Reference:
Kris, A. O. (2005).  The lure of hypocrisy.  JAPA 53:1-22.

To return to the list of Essays, click here.