Narcissism and the emergence of the network society

Eli Zaretsky

pp. 149-166

in: Harry Blatterer, Pauline Johnson, Maria R. Markus (eds), Modern privacy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

A life lived in public, it has been said, is a superficial one. If so, then the psychoanalytic claim to depth is well founded. Not only was psychoanalysis a theory of the private world—that is of personal life—it also took place in private. Psychoanalysis revolved around secrets, not exploits, confidentiality was its highest professional value, and one could give no higher testimony to the success of psychoanalysis than to say that it had been forgotten. Given all this, no subject better exemplified the privileged status that private interior space occupied in psychoanalysis than its attitude toward narcissism.