This post is a summary of the article with the title above published at https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol31/iss2/5/
The state of privacy is related to the act of concealment. Privacy is an outcome of a person's wish to withhold from others certain knowledge as to his past and present experience and action and his intentions for the future.The wish for privacy expresses a desire to be an enigma to others or, more generally, a desire to control others' perceptions. What consequences follow from compulsory visibility? One may hope that the rough answer to this question attempted below will be deemed relevant and useful in appraising the value of privacy in certain of its legal contexts. An adult person lives his life in relation to various social systems. He is taught appropriate ways to behave, depending upon his age, sex, family position, occupation, and social class. If he does not conform to extant role-definitions, sanctions are directed against him. A kind of sanction applied against actions and utterances that are unacceptable, or not intelligible to others, is the process of denigrating the actor or utterer by calling him "mentally ill." If a person can not or will not learn expected roles, he may be regarded by others as "mad." When this happens, the person can be hospitalized. Prior to the pronouncement that he is cured or improved, the patient is subject to eletric shocks, injections, administration of tranquilizing drugs, and conversations with a professional person ( psychiatrist, psychologist, or nurse). The experience of psychotherapists have shown that people maintain themselves in physical health and in psychological well-being when they have a "private place." Those responsible for ruling and leading a society, whether self-appointed or elected, have a vested interest in knowing what people are thinking, feeling, and doing. Even in a democracy, they may spy upon people and reporting to the authorities what they have seen. Bur where there is not privacy, there is little or no individuality. The whole process of a person's becoming a unit is one of divesting himself of his private existence. Sartre's statement holds a psychological as well as an artistic truth. One view of "hell" is changelessness. The person who can not grow, who experiences his own being and the being of the world as "frozen" in its present status, is in a kind of "hell." Without the availability of private places, people suffer individually, and society suffers collectively. As a psychoterapist, I have frequently been called upon to help persons find more viable ways to live than those that have culminated in a breakdown. In my opinion, our educational institutions are misnamed. The schools, from kindergarten through university, might better be called training institutions for promoting conformity in ideology and social behavior. True educators, by contrast, aims at awakening, illuminating and expanding consciousness, at eliciting new possibilities of thinking, feeling and acting; at exploring new realms of value; at providing standards of truth and justice that afford a basis in consciousness for criticizing and modifying existing ways. People who emerge, thus educated, from our institutions of learning are rare. If exploration and inventiveness in ways to live, play, and interact with others is not permitted, or, if permitted, is not conceivable or tolerable to rigidly trained people, we can expect increasing rates of suicide, alcoholism and drug addiction, and psychological and physical breadown. If the general population came to believe that private life is free, that its privacy is to be respected, and that variety, not uniformity, in ways to live is a value, then the expected catastrophes following may be averted. Doubtless, too those current aspects of family life that militate against the quest for viable and health-yielding ways to live in private will have to be changed. In short, privacy is experienced as "room to grow in," as freedom from interference, and as freedom to pursue experimental projects in science, art, work, and living. In the name of the status quo and other, privacy may be eroded. But without privacy and its concomitant, freedom, the cost to be paid for the ends achieved, in terms of lost health, weak commitment to the society, and social stagnation, may be too great.
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