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You are two people: yourself and someone else. This central split in the human mind and its consequences for current culture are the focus of Josh
Cohen's most recent book. As Cohen describes it, one version of you is a public self, knowable and conscious but ‘false’. The other is a private self, elusive and unconscious but ‘true’. Your private, essential self enriches but troubles you because you can never completely know it. In response, you condemn its darkness and omnipotently demand that this darkness be brought to light. This inner struggle between the obscure and the obvious spills out into collective experience and is observable, among many examples, in politics, literature, religion, and even celebrity. For Cohen, contemporary culture's hatred of private domains of experience and its insistence that “nothing remain unknown” (p. xi) is the defining feature of what he calls the “culture of intrusion”.
Cohen's book is also double. The 2013 UK version is entitled The private life: Why we remain in the dark. Its cover shows a solitary black-clad figure, shrouded by a paper bag, who recedes into a dark background. The US edition, published in 2015 as The private life: Our everyday self in an age of intrusion, is illustrated with a crowded field of flashbulb-wielding paparazzi. To me, these elements reflect complementary positions in the battle between public and private - the hidden and the exposed - and evoke, correspondingly, intrusive curiosity and the wish to hide.
As I read further, I came to understand these impressions as a clue to the book's more fundamental double nature. In one light, I found it to be a thoughtful, richly observed, and original work of cultural studies in which Cohen uses psychoanalytic theories (primarily those of Freud, Winnicott, and Bollas) to explore a wide range of cultural expressions of the struggle between public and private. In a different light, however, the book defied my expectation of a structured psychoanalytic cultural c