ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to deconstruct the concept of privacy. It outlines the distinction between privacy and secrecy. The chapter describes the inherent, internalized, and imposed origins of privacy and demonstrated that complex biopsychosocial variables help create and sustain private mentation. It discusses some psychopathological syndromes in this realm and highlighted the role of privacy in the course of intensive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. The chapter describes the psychopathology of privacy and also 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 summarizes the ideas presented in the contribution and by making some brief comments about the impact of gender and aging upon one’s need for privacy. Considered one way, the three pathways to the creation of private mental space pertain to the realm of ‘origins’ or, to employ a medical term, etiology.
