‘Privacy is for paedos’
Josh Cohen, The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark
Granta, 240pp, £20.00, ISBN 9781847085290
reviewed by Helen Tyson
‘Privacy is for paedos,’ announced the former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan in November 2011. Giving evidence before the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press, McMullan captured what seemed to be the driving force behind tabloid and celebrity culture. ‘Fundamentally,’ he insisted, ‘no one else needs it. Privacy is evil … it brings out hypocrisy.’ The private life, according to McMullan, is a dark shelter for the worst imaginable criminal desires, which it is the journalist’s responsibility (aided and abetted by private investigators and phone hackers) to drag out into the light. Alongside McMullan, a host of celebrities (most vociferously Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan) queued up to denounce incursions into their own private lives. These individuals had by their own accounts been subjected to invasions, attacks, and intrusions into a realm of life that they sought to defend from the prurient eyes and ears of the tabloid journalist. But their conception of privacy is not so different from McMullan’s: both share the belief that the private self is something that can be laid hands on and possessed, whether unveiled for all to see or carefully protected, guarded as just another possession (self-possession, no less) amidst the trappings of celebrity life. On either account, the private self is eminently knowable, and the debate falls merely around how much of that self we allow others to see.
In The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark, Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst and professor of literary theory, explores a ‘culture of intrusion, held together by the unholy alliance of voyeurism and exhibitionism’, in which the first guiding principle is that ‘nothing should remain unknown to me’. Meditating on the different manifestations of our obsession with the private life — from Leveson, Katie Price, Heat magazine, Big Brother, Ryan Giggs and super-injunctions, to the trend for ‘lifelogging’ (the practice of recording and broadcasting your life in all its minutiae) — Cohen suggests that the conception of privacy implicit in public debates on the matter is impoverished. The arguments between celebrities and tabloid journalists confuse privacy with secrecy, revolving around what Cohen calls ‘bourgeois privacy’ — a conception of privacy which focuses on the facts of external life that you might prefer to keep secret. Against this version of privacy as an object that we can possess, Cohen describes a more essential privacy: that which I keep private even from myself, and in spite of myself—those elusive zones of excess, of doubleness and opacity residing within the self, that can neither be fully known nor mastered.
In his Introductory Lectures, Sigmund Freud invoked three major blows to the naïve self-love of man. The first of these was the Copernican discovery that earth was not at the centre of the universe. The second blow arrived with Darwin’s discovery that man was descended from the animal. But the third and ‘most wounding’ blow to human narcissism came with the psychoanalytic discovery that the ego ‘is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.’ As Freud was well aware, this assertion that we are never in full possession of our own psychic lives provoked, and continues to provoke, hostile reactions. It is precisely as a defence against this idea of the unconscious — as something irreducibly enigmatic, uncontrollable, even unbearable — that, Cohen suggests, we build up a ‘revenge fantasy’ in which the private life may be fully known, fully possessed, and fully recorded. As a defensive reaction to that humiliating third blow, we surround ourselves with a culture in which the idea of a truly private life is insistently and aggressively disavowed. This war on privacy is waged on a number of fronts: in the tabloid press, in popular psychology’s addiction to the confessional and its insistence that we must and can reveal everything, in reality television shows, in the technological fantasy of the lifelog, and in what Cohen refers to as cognitive behavioural therapy’s ‘genial war on psychic reality’. (CBT, in its demand that the patient ‘correct’ his or her psychic reality, insists upon a rigid distinction between external reality as reality, and the patient’s anxieties, desires and fantasies as simply deluded.) At the heart of Cohen’s book lies the suggestion that the fantasy fuelling this culture is a divorce from, and fearful denial of, its own unconscious — ‘a disowning of the self’s own strangeness.’
The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, in his 1987 book The Shadow of the Object, developed the idea of the ‘normotic personality’ to describe a peculiar and excessive drive to normality, in which the subject evacuates their psychic life, taking flight into an externalised conception of the self as a kind of material object. Cohen suggests that this state of self-alienation serves as a kind of unconscious ideal for the pervasive behaviourist description of modern subjectivity. Such a model of subjectivity, which denies any interior life, is not only deadening, but also mimics the refusal of private life exercised by totalitarian states. In a chapter which explores such diverse figures and writers as Lydia Davis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hannah Arendt, Paul McMullan, Katie Price, and Maurice Blanchot, Cohen draws a line between the assaults on private life carried out in Puritan New England and Soviet Russia, for example, and the ‘more subtly terrorising culture’ of Murdoch’s Old England. In the face of such a deadening and potentially terrorising model of contemporary subjectivity, The Private Life makes a subtle case for the potentially subversive value of psychoanalysis, books, and everyday experience as spaces in which we can intuit a more complex understanding of psychic life.
In his essay ‘On Reading’ (1905), Marcel Proust suggested that, for those suffering from a kind of ‘spiritual depression’ in which they live ‘on the surface, in a perpetual forgetting of themselves’ (rather like Bollas’s normotic), books might play the role of a ‘psychotherapist’, leading the reader back into a relationship with his or her own inner life. The Private Life offers moving testimony to this potential of books to reveal things about ourselves that we did not know or have access to. In a perceptive account of reading a short story by Lydia Davis, Cohen suggests that ‘certain books behave curiously like a psychoanalyst, putting me in contact with my sorest points of vulnerability, anxiety and confusion.’ Sitting in a Boston bookshop Cohen finds himself transported not only into the world of the story, but into the recesses of his own inner life, transformed into a voyeur of his own madness through the peculiar identification of his self with the fictional character—an identification which is also, and crucially, an estrangement from himself, an unsettling of his own sense of self-identity. In another chapter, Cohen describes an experience of the return of the reader’s repressed: reading Maurice Blanchot sends him back in time to a date 20 years earlier when, as a child, he stumbled across the entry on the Holocaust in the Encyclopaedia Judaica. This primal scene of reading is an experience that he had ‘sent somewhere too private even for me to reach’, only for it to return 20 years later, summoned up by another act of reading. These reading experiences do not unveil the private life in some moment of epiphanic enlightenment, but they do put the reader into contact with aspects of his self that otherwise remain silent.
Proust described reading as a peculiar form of solitude in which we nonetheless receive the impulse of another mind—we are, with a book, at once alone and in company. In The Private Life Cohen turns to Donald Winnicott for a similar definition of our capacity to bear solitude: the infant in the care of a parent is, as Winnicott writes, ‘alone (that is in the presence of someone).’ The capacity to be alone is dependent upon the containing frame of an other’s presence. Privacy, in this account, is not isolation or solitude—the retreat or exclusion from a shared human experience. Describing the writing of torture and of the Holocaust, Cohen describes a form of writing where the self has been dragged into a realm of obscurity and isolation, expelled to the outer fringes of human expression, to solitude, and abandoned to an entirely private inner existence. The ‘dark and truncated language’ that Primo Levi warned against in Paul Celan’s writings represents a radical solitude, in which the self has been forced into a realm of incommunicability. There is something incommunicable and enigmatic at the core of human subjectivity; but, for Cohen, this private self exists in a crucial, if always precarious, relationship to its public expression in a shared human language.
As Cohen observes, writing about the unknown treads a delicate path: there is always the danger that the enigmatic will be rendered too knowable in the writing, or elevated into a mystical secret accessible only to privileged initiates. Through its engagement with literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis, The Private Life carefully negotiates its subject to share a conceptualisation of privacy that is, the author suggests, at once a burden and a cause for hope. A burden, because the idea of this essentially unknowable, enigmatic excess at the heart of the private life pushes us to the margins of the psyche—to the point where language and communication break down. A hope, because if we cannot fully know or fully master such aspects of our own subjectivity, it is through books like this that we can at least intuit those recalcitrant and radically singular domains of psychic life.
In The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark, Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst and professor of literary theory, explores a ‘culture of intrusion, held together by the unholy alliance of voyeurism and exhibitionism’, in which the first guiding principle is that ‘nothing should remain unknown to me’. Meditating on the different manifestations of our obsession with the private life — from Leveson, Katie Price, Heat magazine, Big Brother, Ryan Giggs and super-injunctions, to the trend for ‘lifelogging’ (the practice of recording and broadcasting your life in all its minutiae) — Cohen suggests that the conception of privacy implicit in public debates on the matter is impoverished. The arguments between celebrities and tabloid journalists confuse privacy with secrecy, revolving around what Cohen calls ‘bourgeois privacy’ — a conception of privacy which focuses on the facts of external life that you might prefer to keep secret. Against this version of privacy as an object that we can possess, Cohen describes a more essential privacy: that which I keep private even from myself, and in spite of myself—those elusive zones of excess, of doubleness and opacity residing within the self, that can neither be fully known nor mastered.
In his Introductory Lectures, Sigmund Freud invoked three major blows to the naïve self-love of man. The first of these was the Copernican discovery that earth was not at the centre of the universe. The second blow arrived with Darwin’s discovery that man was descended from the animal. But the third and ‘most wounding’ blow to human narcissism came with the psychoanalytic discovery that the ego ‘is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.’ As Freud was well aware, this assertion that we are never in full possession of our own psychic lives provoked, and continues to provoke, hostile reactions. It is precisely as a defence against this idea of the unconscious — as something irreducibly enigmatic, uncontrollable, even unbearable — that, Cohen suggests, we build up a ‘revenge fantasy’ in which the private life may be fully known, fully possessed, and fully recorded. As a defensive reaction to that humiliating third blow, we surround ourselves with a culture in which the idea of a truly private life is insistently and aggressively disavowed. This war on privacy is waged on a number of fronts: in the tabloid press, in popular psychology’s addiction to the confessional and its insistence that we must and can reveal everything, in reality television shows, in the technological fantasy of the lifelog, and in what Cohen refers to as cognitive behavioural therapy’s ‘genial war on psychic reality’. (CBT, in its demand that the patient ‘correct’ his or her psychic reality, insists upon a rigid distinction between external reality as reality, and the patient’s anxieties, desires and fantasies as simply deluded.) At the heart of Cohen’s book lies the suggestion that the fantasy fuelling this culture is a divorce from, and fearful denial of, its own unconscious — ‘a disowning of the self’s own strangeness.’
The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, in his 1987 book The Shadow of the Object, developed the idea of the ‘normotic personality’ to describe a peculiar and excessive drive to normality, in which the subject evacuates their psychic life, taking flight into an externalised conception of the self as a kind of material object. Cohen suggests that this state of self-alienation serves as a kind of unconscious ideal for the pervasive behaviourist description of modern subjectivity. Such a model of subjectivity, which denies any interior life, is not only deadening, but also mimics the refusal of private life exercised by totalitarian states. In a chapter which explores such diverse figures and writers as Lydia Davis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hannah Arendt, Paul McMullan, Katie Price, and Maurice Blanchot, Cohen draws a line between the assaults on private life carried out in Puritan New England and Soviet Russia, for example, and the ‘more subtly terrorising culture’ of Murdoch’s Old England. In the face of such a deadening and potentially terrorising model of contemporary subjectivity, The Private Life makes a subtle case for the potentially subversive value of psychoanalysis, books, and everyday experience as spaces in which we can intuit a more complex understanding of psychic life.
In his essay ‘On Reading’ (1905), Marcel Proust suggested that, for those suffering from a kind of ‘spiritual depression’ in which they live ‘on the surface, in a perpetual forgetting of themselves’ (rather like Bollas’s normotic), books might play the role of a ‘psychotherapist’, leading the reader back into a relationship with his or her own inner life. The Private Life offers moving testimony to this potential of books to reveal things about ourselves that we did not know or have access to. In a perceptive account of reading a short story by Lydia Davis, Cohen suggests that ‘certain books behave curiously like a psychoanalyst, putting me in contact with my sorest points of vulnerability, anxiety and confusion.’ Sitting in a Boston bookshop Cohen finds himself transported not only into the world of the story, but into the recesses of his own inner life, transformed into a voyeur of his own madness through the peculiar identification of his self with the fictional character—an identification which is also, and crucially, an estrangement from himself, an unsettling of his own sense of self-identity. In another chapter, Cohen describes an experience of the return of the reader’s repressed: reading Maurice Blanchot sends him back in time to a date 20 years earlier when, as a child, he stumbled across the entry on the Holocaust in the Encyclopaedia Judaica. This primal scene of reading is an experience that he had ‘sent somewhere too private even for me to reach’, only for it to return 20 years later, summoned up by another act of reading. These reading experiences do not unveil the private life in some moment of epiphanic enlightenment, but they do put the reader into contact with aspects of his self that otherwise remain silent.
Proust described reading as a peculiar form of solitude in which we nonetheless receive the impulse of another mind—we are, with a book, at once alone and in company. In The Private Life Cohen turns to Donald Winnicott for a similar definition of our capacity to bear solitude: the infant in the care of a parent is, as Winnicott writes, ‘alone (that is in the presence of someone).’ The capacity to be alone is dependent upon the containing frame of an other’s presence. Privacy, in this account, is not isolation or solitude—the retreat or exclusion from a shared human experience. Describing the writing of torture and of the Holocaust, Cohen describes a form of writing where the self has been dragged into a realm of obscurity and isolation, expelled to the outer fringes of human expression, to solitude, and abandoned to an entirely private inner existence. The ‘dark and truncated language’ that Primo Levi warned against in Paul Celan’s writings represents a radical solitude, in which the self has been forced into a realm of incommunicability. There is something incommunicable and enigmatic at the core of human subjectivity; but, for Cohen, this private self exists in a crucial, if always precarious, relationship to its public expression in a shared human language.
As Cohen observes, writing about the unknown treads a delicate path: there is always the danger that the enigmatic will be rendered too knowable in the writing, or elevated into a mystical secret accessible only to privileged initiates. Through its engagement with literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis, The Private Life carefully negotiates its subject to share a conceptualisation of privacy that is, the author suggests, at once a burden and a cause for hope. A burden, because the idea of this essentially unknowable, enigmatic excess at the heart of the private life pushes us to the margins of the psyche—to the point where language and communication break down. A hope, because if we cannot fully know or fully master such aspects of our own subjectivity, it is through books like this that we can at least intuit those recalcitrant and radically singular domains of psychic life.