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It is gratifying to see The Private Life provide occasion for such an expansive, intelligent and theoretically cosmopolitan discussion of the fundamental but too often neglected question of psychoanalytic aims (BJP 31(4), November 2015). I find much to enjoy and learn from in Roger Bacon's review essay, above all in his subtle adumbration and development of Guyomard's notion of a ‘third space’, in which privacy is understood as a ‘capacity’ born from the paradoxical intimacy of the analytic relation. Whether this sense of privacy is as far from my own as the review suggests is another question, to which I'll duly return.
After two careful readings, I'm left wondering why the attentive intimacy which models Bacon's conception of the analytic relation doesn't carry over to his reading of the book. The roughly one third of the review that discusses The Private Life directly does so by way of a summary and largely inaccurate reduction of its arguments to a series of propositional claims that can then be shown up for their ‘confusions and contradictions’. This in turn serves as the springboard for the exposition of a corrective (and very suggestive) conception of analytic privacy in supposed opposition to mine.
By boiling its content down to a series of discrete propositions with which to agree or disagree, the review sets up an adversarial relation to the book, closing down the very dialogue it might have opened up. There is very little attention to the paradoxes and ambiguities which shape both its arguments and its winding, associative style. In a review of 6000 words, only two passages are directly referenced, one an anecdote, the other its two concluding paragraphs, quoted in full as though their meaning were self-evident and required no contextualization or gloss beyond their summarily dismissive and question-begging description as ‘deeply Romantic’.
Why should Bacon set up his model of privacy in such stark contrast to mine, as though there were no points of contact