The Private Life: Our Everyday Self in an Age of Intrusion

by Josh Cohen

With social networking and reality television, self–help columns and daytime talk shows, there's an infinite array of platforms to both expose our deepest thoughts and examine the thoughts of others. In this age of non–stop communication, one's privacy is subject to unrelenting examination, intrusion, and attack from the media, the government, friends, family, and complete strangers.So what are we trying to hide? And what are we trying to find out about others? Practicing psychoanalyst and professor of literature Josh Cohen tackles those questions in his study of privacy and personality, the "most vulnerable and indestructible region of your self." Using Sigmund Freud's theories on identity and the ego as a foundation, Cohen weaves through time and place to study an extensive variety of people who unearthed and revealed the rawest form of their selves. From Adam and Eve to the ballerinas in the hit 2010 film Black Swan, from Hester Prynne to British celebrity Katie Price, Cohen finds Freud's ideas in both fiction and reality alike.Yet even with all the times that we've exposed the inner workings of our psyches, Cohen is sure to emphasize that some part of every individual will always remain hidden. Like Freud once wrote, "The ego is not master in its own house." In a culture that floods our lives with light, how is it that we remain so helplessly in the dark?

199 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2015

About the author

Josh Cohen is a professor of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the author of many books, including The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark

Reviews

[Gaetano Venezia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Isn't there . . . [an] essential privacy, namely what I keep private even from myself — and in spite of myself? Drag every sordid secret into the light and something of your self, perhaps the very thing that really matters, would still remain in the dark. It's the privacy of this stubborn remainder, which no lens can penetrate and no law can defend, that I shall explore in this book." (xi)

"The primary value of private life, in face of this [normative, techno-scientific] assault on psychic reality, is to preserve the self's essential ambiguity." (197)

There are some real aphoristic gems and interesting redescriptions of psychoanalysis in this essayistic meditation on the anxieties of authenticity in contemporary culture. However, if you aren't that taken in by ideas about privacy and authenticity, you can get better-suited treatment from Cohen's other books, like How to Live. What to Do: In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature, or similar writers like Adam Phillips. That was the case for me. Clinical depression that I labeled misanthropic melancholy as a teenager has long made me feel distanced from others and myself. And some other, unlabeled part of myself simply doesn't care that much about privacy or authenticity as such. Zen, psychoanalysis, American Pragmatism, interdisciplinary studies, and abstract and postmodern art have shown me that nothing can be fully represented or authentic.

Quotes
"Psychoanalysis hints that your voracious wish to know everything is tied intimately to the humiliating truth that you can't know everything (xiii)

"In this book, I offer claims for psychoanalysis, art and ordinary human experience as ways into a different relationships to our own and others' privacy (xvi)

"Psychoanalysis insists on a self that overspills the classifications to which science and consumer society would reduce us, a self that is fundamentally excessive." (20)

"Psychoanalysis doesn't think you're 'really' anything. It finds your truth in your being always more than one, in excess of yourself, irreducible to anyone else." (47)

Imagining Freud reflecting on psychoanalysis:
"Perhaps . . . I haven't so much brought light to the dark as made the light darker" (59)

"Everything about the book or analyst or lover enriches your experience, deepens your passion and curiosity for your own and others' lives, your sense of involvement in the world. But this passion is as intrusive as it is enriching. It creeps insidiously under your skin and into your soul, leaving you with the feeling that whatever life might be ahead of you, it won't be quiet and untroubled." (66)

"Words are the medium through which you both make sense of and become irremediably confused by your desires" (90)

"the failure of words to coincide with the things they name is a, if not the, central predicament of being human" (90)

"If you drag the meanings of ordinary life and language into the consulting room and let them define what you hear, you lose your ear for psychic reality, for the unconscious currents swirling in the slipstream of the most mundane words." (135)

"Being *absolutely there*, letting the child or patient tell what she has to say without intruding your own wish, demand or claim, is perhaps as hard as parenting or analysis gets. What makes a good hotel? A place whose ministrations and gratifications are both constant and discrete a kind of fantastical mother whose unstinting care demands no gratitude, no awareness even. Whereas a bad hotel is one that forces you to see the resentment aroused by the strain of taking care of you." (185)

[Nia Nymue · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was such a painful book to read. There were one or two interesting ideas that the writer explores, but I think he discussed them in a rather unstructured way. And a lot of it does not seem to contribute to his main point. I feel like I've wasted weeks of my life reading this.