The Psychology of Psychotherapist Transparency

Key points

Therapist transparency exists on a broad spectrum depending upon the practitioner and theoretical orientation.

Therapist transparency can be helpful in certain situations but harmful in others.

The degree of therapist transparency is part of what differentiates friendship from therapy.

Part 1 of a 2-part series.

As Devon Frye's November/December 2025 Psychology Today magazine article rightly notes, the matter of psychotherapist self-disclosure or transparency goes way back to the early days of psychoanalysis . Classically-trained Freudian analysts were taught to be "abstinent" in the presence of their analysands (patients) as regards any sharing of personal information with them or, more generally, doing anything that would potentially distract or detract from or de