ABSTRACT
This chapter defines privacy and differentiates it from secrecy. It outlines the intricate linkages between form and origin in this realm, highlighting different pathways to the inception and sustenance of a private mental life. The chapter describes the psychopathology of privacy and discusses the role of privacy in the conduct of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, making comments upon the patient’s privacy, the analyst’s privacy, and the mutual dialectics between them. It explains the impact of gender and aging upon one’s need for privacy. Less malignant versions of ‘imposed privacy’ are found in compliance with widely accepted societal taboos on topics of conversation. Variable from culture to culture, such restrictions result in pockets of unspoken and even unmentalized psychic material. While hybrid and oscillating forms might exist, more often the two types of psychopathology of privacy are relatively rigid: too much privacy or too little privacy.
