Confidentiality, anonymisation and their digital discontents

Scientific communication about clinical work is complicated for psychoanalysts by the requirement to protect confidentiality, the potentially disruptive effect that seeking consent may have on the treatment, and questions about whether informed consent is possible if the unconscious is taken seriously. For these reasons, the balance of opinion has tended to favour disguise over consent, but in the digital age and with the advent of AI doubts have arisen about whether it is possible to achieve a level of disguise that would prevent any third party from recognising the patient. The papers in this Psychoanalytic Controversies section by John Churcher, Denia Barrett, Aden Evens and Sarah Ackerman, Vittorio Lingiardi and Mariana Liotti, and David Tuckett explore different aspects of the question of whether in the digital age effective anonymisation is possible.