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It is not unusual that young people get panic-stricken by their own thoughts and fantasies while talking with a psychotherapist or an analyst. They are terrified because it is forbidden to keep their fantasies to themselves. The conflict is about demarcating one's inner private sphere; to dare to maintain one's own world against a mother's wish to hear and to disclose one's interior space. To keep silent is a mortal danger and to share all your secrets is the same as killing your soul. It is a kind of vulnerability that follows you through life, a conflict inherent in every human being.
In our culture, we maintain the notion that we need to contain our innermost thoughts in order to stimulate psychic growth and develop our self-government. But on the other hand, since time immemorial, we have equated thought and action. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says: “But what I tell you is this: If a man looks on a woman with a lustful eye, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart. “If your right eye is your undoing, tear it out and fling it away; it is better for you to lose one part of your body than for the whole of it to be thrown into hell.“ (Matthew 5, 28-29).
Is it not a matter of fact that utopians of every period of history have been hostile to private thoughts and chastised them as an antisocial drive? To place the thought on equal footing with the action has always been an effective way to get control of man's inner world as, e.g., the confession of the church.
Historical works, such as “Histoire de la vie privee“ (ed. by Phillipe Aries and Georges Duby), demonstrate how the view of public world versus private life has changed during the passage of history; notions such as inner psychic life seem to have held no meaning before the Renaissance. Privacy was looked upon as inferior, something for women, children and slaves. Privacy was the same as mystery-making; a shameful desire, equated