ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the implications for privacy when telecommunications, of any kind and introduces the psychoanalytic setting. Tacit knowledge of this kind is to a large degree socially shared, and normally the analyst’s confidence in the acoustic isolation of the consulting room will be met by a similar confidence in the patient. In the classical psychoanalytic setting, eavesdropping is in principle possible if the walls are thin, or if the arrangements for maintaining acoustic isolation are in some other way compromised, but reports of its occurrence in clinical practice are rare. S. Freud described as the starting point of fetishism, and which J. Steiner has discussed as the basis of a perverse attitude of “turning of a blind eye” in the direction of reality. Norms of expectation concerning the privacy of telecommunications tend to vary between different countries and communities with differing histories of relations between government and citizens.