If a therapist were to say, for example, “My father died ten years ago,” that apparently simple fact could have complex and unpredictable effects on the client. It might inhibit them from speaking about death. Or evoke a wish to look after the therapist, or provoke guilt, or pull the therapy into a pseudo-friendship. In each case, the client’s freedom contracts. They begin to manage the therapist, rather than using the therapist.
Therapy offers a rare inversion of ordinary relational life: the client does not have to care for the therapist. The therapist’s restraint — their choice not to fill the room with their own history — protects that asymmetry so that the client’s transference can unfold, be spoken, and ultimately be understood.
A therapeutic relationship is not a friendship. Its difference is not simply stylistic, but structural. Psychoanalysis has long understood that the work depends on creating a particular kind of psychological space, in which the client’s unconscious communications, fantasies, and conflicts can emerge with minimal interference. This requires something Freud called “evenly-hovering attention” on the therapist’s side and, crucially, “free association” on the client’s side. Anything that constrains that freedom — including too much knowledge of the therapist’s personal life — risks narrowing what can be said or felt.
In ordinary friendships, reciprocity is the norm: I disclose, you disclose. That mutuality is healthy and human, but it inevitably sets up expectations, roles, and mutual obligations. These can be a constraint of the client’s freedom to explore or express conscious or unconscious material in the therapy.
The therapist’s privacy is not secrecy for its own sake; it’s actually a technique. By withdrawing their personal story from the room, the therapist preserves what Winnicott might call a “potential space,” an area of freedom where the client can experiment with thoughts, feelings, and impulses that would be forbidden or shaming in ordinary social life. It is a space where one can be angry, infantile, idealising, dismissive, or utterly uncertain without having to protect or take care of the other person.
Photo credit: Alex Sawyer
