ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses the role of three psychic barriers in the development of a sense of privacy: the incest barrier, the screen, and the impasse. Each clinical structure met with in psychoanalysis presents its own challenges regarding the way privacy is handled in the consulting room. The author addresses his own ideas of privacy that are derived from six different realms: personal experience, a movie, a painting, a piece of fiction, some architectural facts, and a celebrated clinical case from psychoanalytic history. The tenet of individual conscience had two effects on the acceptance of psychoanalysis in American culture. It established a person’s right to wrestle with emotional conflicts in the privacy of his own mind. A. Freud addressed issues of privacy in his discussions of the Oedipal complex, the incest barrier, the primal scene fantasy, and the birth trauma.
