ABSTRACT
Privacy has a much more ramified and intimate relationship to the whole structure of human interaction and values, and to the nature of individual personality. Erikson sees the life cycle as a series of stages which may be described in terms of developments at the boundary of the self. The first stage of life is said to have as its primary task the development of “basic trust,” so that the infant can face the world with confidence and allow himself to be open to experience. The second psychosocial stage, according to Erikson, has as its central problem the development of autonomy. The child's age mates reciprocate with intrusion, and it becomes necessary to learn to reject intrusion. At this “Oedipal” stage the child experiences a new sense of privacy in its attempt to reject others' intrusions upon its partly real, partly fantasied relationship to the parent of the opposite sex.
