Mediation in therapist–client sex: A model.

Bouhoutsos, Jacqueline C.; Brodsky, Annette M.

doi:10.1037/h0085493

Cited by 14 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…As with any assessment or judgment a professional makes, these reports concerning whether allegations are true or false, whether a patient’s dysfunction or distress is attributable in whole or in part to a specific event, or whether the respondent’s training was adequate may be wrong for any number of reasons, including inadequate or misleading data provided by the patients or other sources, personal bias, or insufficient care in reaching a professional opinion. Holroyd and Bouhoutsos (1985), for example, found that therapists who had engaged in sexual intimacies with a patient exhibited a bias against finding any harm when evaluating patients who had been sexually intimate with other therapists. Furthermore, any harm that may result from therapist—patient sexual intimacies can, like harm from incest, be delayed, sometimes for a period of years ( see Gabbard, 1989), a fact that the courts are beginning to affirm.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prior therapist-patient sexual involvement among patients seen by psychologists.

Pope¹,

Vetter²

1991

Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training

105

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prior therapist-patient sexual involvement among patients seen by psychologists.

Pope¹,

Vetter²

1991

Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training

105

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“…Greg's problems in his marriage and personal life fit with most research findings regarding some of the antecedents to boundary violations. For example, in cases of offenses, deliberate opportunism, distressed practitioners, vulnerable, needy and/or lonely practitioners, lack of skill, training, and experience, and a general blurring of boundaries have been observed as contributory (Bouhoutsos & Brodsky, 1985;Gabbard & Lester, 1995). In addition, Butler and Zelen (1977) found that over half of the psychiatrists and psychologists they interviewed who had engaged in sexual contact reported falling in love with their clients.…”

Section: Greg's Talementioning

confidence: 93%

Transference and Countertransference in Sport Psychology Service Delivery: Part II. Two Case Studies on the Erotic

Stevens

Andersen

2007

Journal of Applied Sport Psychology

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In Part II, we present two case studies of erotic transference and countertransference in sport psychology service delivery. We interviewed two seasoned practitioners, both with long histories of working with athletes. These sport psychologists represent two extremes of the spectrum when encountering the erotic in service delivery. One participant's story is about denial, suppression, and repression of anything that hints of the erotic in practitioner-client relationships. The other sport psychologist's story is about a nearly unbridled reveling in the erotic with a client. The practitioners are easy to condemn, one for ignorance and lack of awareness of self and others, the other for adolescent fantasies and objectification of his client. But those responses are facile and uncharitable. We present these two cases as examples, albeit extreme ones, of how truly complex the erotic is in service delivery. Their stories illustrate, in sometimes painful and graphic ways, what it is to be human, all-too-human, in our encounters with the people we serve.In our previous article, Transference and Countertransference in Sport Psychology Service Delivery: Part I. A Review of Erotic Attraction, we examined the literature on erotic attraction in service delivery. We highlighted the suggestions of researchers that the process of exploration and discovery of the sport psychologists' experiences of, and reactions to, erotic feelings should occur in an environment where colleagues' experiences are also shared (e.g., Andersen, 2005;Pope, Sonne, & Holroyd, 1993). In response to these suggestions, I (first author) interviewed six practitioners and asked about their experiences (or not) of erotic feelings in sport psychology service delivery. The stories the psychologists told were then interpreted using primarily psychodynamic theory and past research findings. In this paper we present two of the case studies complete with illustrative segments of the transcripts and theoretical interpretations. Although each psychologist had received ethical training that consisted primarily of being told "thou shalt not have sex with a client," there was a marked contrast in the ways the psychologists dealt with erotic feelings in service delivery.To underscore the gravity of these issues, we take a quote from a recent book chapter on erotic transference and countertransference (Andersen, 2005):

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“…Third, some colleagues have advanced the alternative of assisting victims through mediation. This model, pioneered in 1983 by Schoener, Milgrom, and Gonsiorek offers a rapid and less formal means of dealing with the problem and has been successfully used by others (Bouhoutsos & Brodsky, 1985). With successful mediation, however, the victim may not file a formal complaint, thereby allowing the offending psychologist to escape formal disciplinary procedures (Pope Q .…”

Section: Avoiding Exploitive Dual Relationships: a Decision-making Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple relationships.

Pope¹,

Borys²,

Gutheil³

et al. 1995

Ethical Conflicts in Psychology.

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When Borys and Pope (1989) surveyed 2,352 psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists, only about 16 of them considered "engaging in sexual activity with a current client" to be ethical. One of the few absolute prohibitions in the current APA code, as well as in its predecessor, is that barring sexual intimacies with current psychotherapy clients (see Principle 6a, APA, 1990; Standard 4.05, APA, 1992). Yet, the APA ethics committee (1994) reported that, in 1993, "the largest single category of unethical behavior in cases that endiedl in the loss of membership is sexual misconduct" (p. 663).Accusations that professionals in positions of power have engaged in inappropriate sexual intimacies have evoked publicity and absorbed the public's attention, particularly during the past decade. This notoriety has not been limited to mental health practitioners but has touched senators, governors, presidents, and Supreme Court justices.troubling form of multiple relationship, it is a relatively low probability event. Many other potential forms of multiple relationships are more likely to confront not only the therapist but the researcher, tester, supervisor, and professor as well. For example, what if a carpenter cannot afford to pay for a psychological assessment of his or her child and offers to build some bookshelves in lieu of the psychologist's fee? What if a research subject asks the experimenter for a date? Can faculty members invite their graduate students to their houses for social gatherings? What should the chair of an admissions committee do if a close friend applies to the chair's doctoral program and it is the only one in the area that the friend can afford to attend? What if patients want to give their therapists inexpensive gifts? Can a psychologist supervising a graduate student in a practicum also become the supervisee's therapist? These are potentially knotty problems that are not always easily resolved by explicit prohibitory language in the ethics c0de.lIn this chapter, then, one of the goals is to delineate the wide variety of multiple rdationships that can confront psychologists, regardless of the settings in which they work or the roles they perform. With these readings, I also seek to educate readers about the consequences of engaging in multiple relationships and to provide some guidance in avoiding the harm that such relationships can cause.Although sexual impropriety between clients and clinicians is the most written about and But this chapter has more implicit and far-ranging aims. For example, one of the topics As an example of really low probability events, consider a case brought before the Arizona Board of Psychologist Examiners. It involved a psycholopt, also ordained as a minister, who performed an exorcism on a 10-year-old boy and then billed child protective services for his treatment.

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Mediation in therapist–client sex: A model.

Cited by 14 publications

References 4 publications

Prior therapist-patient sexual involvement among patients seen by psychologists.

Prior therapist-patient sexual involvement among patients seen by psychologists.

Transference and Countertransference in Sport Psychology Service Delivery: Part II. Two Case Studies on the Erotic

Multiple relationships.

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