Private Matters: In Defense Of The Personal LifeIn this eloquent and reflective book, Janna Malamud Smith traces a modern history of privacy, revealing how our inner and outer lives are nurtured by this fragile virtue.Today we enjoy more privacy than ever before, yet the encroachment of the media, computer data gathering, and electronic surveillance in our lives undermines our sense that we have any privacy at all. Smith argues that having a say in when and how we watch one another is key to ongoing debates about freedom. Our ideal of individual liberty—a person who is free to make choices about her own life—is not possible without the protection of privacy.Yet privacy can be used for the wrong reasons. The same condition that sustains intimacy, creativity, and freedom can also be invoked as an abusive kind of secrecy. to explore this paradox Smith looks at privacy refracted through various prisms: the bedroom, the psychiatrist's couch, the biographer's quest for information, the presidency and presidential families, the news media, women and their bodies. We see the supple quality of privacy as we look at its role in everyday life; we see how essential it is to our capacity to love and create and think—to our humanity.Combining the emotional sensitivity of a psychotherapist with the insights of a literary writer, Janna Malamud Smith offers a compelling portrait of one of the most precious aspects of life. Her book shows us that, indeed, privacy matters. |
Contents
My Daughter My Sister | 13 |
Privacy and Private States | 27 |
Stevenson at the Inn | 53 |
Copyright | |
3 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
abuse allowed ambivalence American anonymity Aspern Papers audience become behavior biography Breuer century child Clinton communal contemporary create culture describes Edel Emerson experience explore eyes fact fantasies father fear feelings felt fiction freedom Freud gossip harm Harriet Harriet Beecher Stowe Henry James Henry Ward Beecher human husband Hyde Ibid idea imagine individual intimacy intimate Jacobs Jacobs's Jekyll Leon Leon Edel letters Lincoln live look Margaret Sanger mother newspaper observed offered person president private space protect psyche psychoanalysis psychological psychotherapy recounts relationship revealed Rhodes Robert Louis Stevenson Sally Jesse Raphael secrecy secret seek sense sexual shame Sigmund Freud slave social solitude someone sometimes speak story Stowe surveillance talk television tell therapist Tilton tion Uncle Tom's Cabin unconscious vacy Victoria Woodhull violated vulnerable Washington watching wish for privacy woman women write wrote York