To recognise oneself.

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Clinical Psychology
• Psychoanalysis

Background:

• Publishing clinical reports raises privacy concerns regarding patient identification.
• Preventing third-party identification of patients in clinical narratives is crucial for ethical practice.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a multi-stage process for anonymizing clinical reports.
• To enhance the protection of patient confidentiality in published psychoanalytic work.

Main Methods:

• Documenting the clinical event as a subjective narrative by the analyst.
• Abstracting general insights and identifying underlying structures from the initial narrative.
• Performing anonymization in a third step, illustrating the gained knowledge with a clinical vignette.

Main Results:

• The proposed multi-stage process involves interpretation, abstraction, and anonymization.
• Anonymization effectiveness may depend on the third party's familiarity with the patient.

Conclusions:

• A staged approach to anonymization can help protect patient identity in clinical publications.
• Careful consideration of the anonymization process is necessary to balance clinical insight with privacy protection.