Confidentiality & ethics

The place of ethics in this work

Many methods guide clinical practice. Of these, none has stayed as closely bound to the scientific rigour Freud first brought to psychoanalysis as the approach developed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It is this Lacanian orientation that guides my work with anxiety, depression, difficulties in relationships, and addiction — and within it, questions of ethics are not an add-on to the clinical work but part of its very fabric.

If guilt arises from the conflict between our deepest desires and the demands of a shared, “civilised” morality, then the analyst’s task cannot be to resolve that conflict by handing out a better ideal. Psychoanalysis is wary of ideals altogether — including the ideals of “happiness” or “health.” Its aim instead is to help a person find their own relation to what they want, and to what they do. As Freud put it: the analyst respects the patient’s individuality, does not try to remould them according to his own ideas, and is glad to avoid giving advice, preferring instead to awaken the patient’s own capacity to act.

Confidentiality in practice

Confidentiality is often one of the first things people want to be sure of before they can speak freely, and rightly so. My practice follows the Ethical Framework for Good Practice in Counselling & Psychotherapy set out by the BACP (British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy). In practical terms, this means:

• Your consent comes first.

  Nothing about our work is shared with anyone else without your knowledge and agreement, and if a genuine conflict of interest were ever to arise, I would tell you as soon as I became aware of it.

• Privacy is actively protected, not just assumed.

  What you bring to sessions is treated as sensitive by default. Any need to share information is approached with your autonomy and trust as the starting point, not an afterthought.

• There are limits, and they are narrow.

  Confidentiality is not absolute — no therapeutic confidentiality is, anywhere. In rare situations involving a serious and immediate risk to your safety or someone else’s, or where I am legally required to act, I may need to break confidentiality. Where I can, I will always try to discuss this with you first. This is a legal and ethical boundary I take seriously, not a loophole — it exists to protect people, not to justify casual disclosure.

• Records are kept carefully.

  Where notes are necessary, they are kept securely and only for as long as is professionally appropriate, in line with data protection law (UK GDPR).

• My own practice is supervised.

  Like all practitioners working within this orientation, I discuss my clinical work regularly in supervision with an analyst of the School. This is a standard and required part of ethical practice, not an exception to confidentiality: what is discussed in supervision is anonymised, and its purpose is to keep the work itself honest and well-founded — for your benefit, not despite it.

If you get in touch through this website

Enquiries sent through the contact form are delivered to me by Web3Forms, a third-party form service based in the United States; message content is not retained by them beyond a short processing window. I’d encourage you to keep initial enquiries brief — a first conversation is the right place for anything more detailed.

If anything here raises a question, I’m glad to talk it through before we begin working together.