Private Matters: In Defense Of The Personal Life

by Janna Malamud Smith

In 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.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 7, 1997

About the author

Janna Malamud Smith is a practicing psychotherapist and the acclaimed author of four books, including An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Creative Mastery, My Father is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud; A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear; and Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life. Her titles have been New York Times Notable Books and she has been interviewed about her work on top national broadcast media. Her newly published book, An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Creative Mastery, examines the psychological obstacles and fears that prevent aspiring and established artists from building a sustainable, nurturing, and realistic creative practice against the background of how many of today's hot button topics, including social media, technology, the recession, sexuality, and identity, impact the creative process. For more information on Janna Malamud Smith, please visit: www.jannamalamudsmith.com

Reviews

[Linda]

"The virtue of privacy, as I have come to understand it, is not in isolating people, but in allowing them temporary space in which they may accomplish important human tasks that are otherwise thwarted."

"Philippe Aries writes that "until the end of the seventeenth century, nobody was ever left alone. The density of social life made isolation virtually impossible, and people who managed to shut themselves up in a room for some time were regarded as exceptional characters."