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.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
This book offers an engaging look at the concept of privacy as it is practiced and imagined in contemporary American society. The author, the daughter of the novelist Bernard Malamud, is a practicing social worker and therapist who has given a great deal of thought to the value of privacy in an increasingly interdependent world. Although Smith recognizes that privacy sometimes conceals abuse against vulnerable members of society, she also maintains that privacy is essential for the development of individuality and close personal relations. "The wish for privacy," she writes, "is the wish to control what is known or revealed about ourselves and our private world." Yet privacy is under assault from a variety of sources, and the "temptation to misuse private data appears to be almost irresistible." In the end, she calls on Americans to renew their commitment to privacy and to ensure that the boundaries between public and private are not dissolved altogether. Recommended for all social science collections.?Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Where Alderman and Kennedy's Right to Privacy (1991) addressed the legal background of the "right" to privacy and current violations, therapist Smith, daughter of the late novelist Bernard Malamud, offers a wide-ranging analysis of privacy's role--positive and, sometimes, negative--in individuals' construction and expansion of their humanness. Reminding readers that the modern concept of privacy is a relatively recent historical phenomenon, linked to but not coterminous with individualism's rise, Smith examines the complex, even contradictory sources of the wish for privacy (shame, inhibition, self-protection, control, exhibitionism, shyness, guilt), the in-the-family crimes privacy can cloak, and the vital personal purposes that privacy (which, Alan Westin suggested, includes solitude, anonymity, reserve, and intimacy) often serves. Familiar figures (Freud, the Reverend Henry Beecher, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, Bill Clinton, Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey, and Smith's author-father) play notable roles in Smith's probing meditation on why human beings need particular kinds of privacy and on our contemporary ambivalence about privacy and surveillance. Insightful and provocative. Mary Carroll
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