ABSTRACT
Most illnesses begin in the private inner world of the suffering individual, and will only be revealed when and where there is an offer of intimacy. There is a striking disparity in the ways in which denial is interpreted in physical and mental illnesses. There are some illnesses which abolish privacy at their very beginning, and the situation becomes one of 'privacy in public'. Subjective experience and the feelings that it invokes are free-floating and infinite, yet completely unique to the individual. Privacy shared is intimacy, but families are more or less intimate and help or inhibit the expression of illness to a very variable extent. Concretised into thoughts, feelings begin to be both structured and restricted. Mikhail Bakhtin described the way in which words are changed and refracted by each usage – continually subject to both centripetal and centrifugal forces.
