Kathleen A Sullivan, “Self-Disclosure, Separation, and Students: Intimacy in the Clinical Relationship”

This article describes the author’s discomfort in sharing personal details about her life with clinic students. The author describes how relationships between supervisors and clinical students can be intimate and the extent to which intimacy is generally a feature of clinical teaching relationships. This relationship is one of the greatest challenges in clinical legal education. This article suggests that clinical teaching is a more intimate form of teaching, and thus, disclosure plays an important role in making the clinical relationship more intimate. The potential for intimacy within the clinic setting is positive; however, it can present difficult dilemmas in relation to power and control. The issues of intimacy and distances in clinical legal education are analogous to the themes of connection and separation in feminist scholarship.

Intimacy is characterized by four features: proximity, mutuality, trust, and self-disclosure. Proximity involves physical closeness, a benefit to both the supervisor and the student. Mutuality requires an element of reciprocity in clinician’s relationships with their students. To the degree that a relationship is mutual, it is a more equal relationship. Trust is the dependence on the goodwill of another. Trust is integral to the supervisory relationship as it requires supervisors to trust the student sufficiently to allow them to lawyer in her name, all the while respecting student autonomy. Lastly, self-disclosure is integral to developing intimacy because it requires revealing personal information about oneself to another. Often, students who can either separate or connect very well have trouble doing both well. These issues might be related to gender. Frequently, white, middle-class male students, have difficulties empathizing with their clients who are often poor, female, or people of colour. Occasionally, this same individual is effective in courtroom settings.  Similarly, there are often female students who are empathetic and effective with clients but are flustered in the courtroom. Strengthening the weakened aspects of students is often difficult for supervisors. However, the more supervisors integrate intimacy into their relationships with students, the more disclosure will manifest, and subsequently, students will have more opportunities to develop the skills within themselves.

Kathleen A Sullivan, “Self-Disclosure, Separation, and Students: Intimacy in the Clinical Relationship” (1993) 27:1 Ind L Rev 115.