Privacy

Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms

Salman Akhtar, Aisha Abbasi, Salman Akhtar, Aisha Abbasi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367194048
• eBook ISBN: 9780429514326
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this, the latest in a series of books examining emotional states and psychological life, Salman Akhtar and Aisha Abbasi critically discuss a concept that remains, appropriately perhaps, elusive and hard to define: privacy.

Overlapping with ideas of solitude, secrecy, and anonymity, the concept of privacy poses several crucial questions for analysts. How do our ideas of privacy evolve from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, for example, and when does the need for privacy become morbid and psychopathological? How is privacy conceived differently in different cultures and sub-cultures? Investigating the tension between anonymity and self-disclosure, the book also assesses the challenges posed to clinical privacy, as well as the analyst's own privacy, by the impact of social media and the wider digital age.

Privacy: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms represents an important contribution to psychoanalytic literature. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and training as well as to researchers interested in the concept of privacy from across the applied and social sciences and the humanities.

PART I

Developmental realm

2

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SENSE OF PRIVACY

Alexandra Harrison

In this chapter, I will briefly summarize the developmental process by which infants move (1) from an awareness of physical and mental connectedness and separateness and begin to organize a sense of agency, (2) through the development of a theory of mind in which they can keep secrets, tell lies, and appreciate others as having beliefs that are different from their own, (3) to a sense of agency that is protective of their own beliefs. To do this, I will draw on Reddy’s (2008) concept of ‘second person psychology’ to discuss the processes of engagement and disengagement, crucial to the meaning of privacy. Finally, I will demonstrate the changing meanings of privacy and agency in the analysis of a four- to five-year-old boy.

The development of a sense of ‘privacy’ in children is difficult to describe, largely because the meaning of ‘privacy’ or ‘private’ is complicated. Many languages, for instance Japanese, do not have a word for ‘private’; though now, Japanese use an English derivative to refer to this hitherto alien concept. It is also true that within one culture, each family creates its own sense of what is acceptable to be shared and what must be kept private.

Here, I will discuss privacy in terms of the experience of having made an intentional choice to disengage from another or others. I emphasize intentional choice to distinguish this type of disengagement from abandonment or defensive dissociation. Disengagement for the sake of privacy is intended for self-regulation, self-reflection, and secrecy – all activities that support a sense of agency in the individual. From infancy, a pattern of engagement and disengagement is established between infant and caregiver. It is within this rhythmic pattern that the child learns how to regulate her affects and states of arousal. Self-regulation forms the foundation for agency.

I will first summarize some of the infant research concerning the active role taken by the infant in the infant–caregiver interaction as described by Tronick (2007b), Beebe and Lachmann (2002), Trevarthen and Malloch (2002), and Sander (2008). I will then briefly discuss the development of theory of mind, defined as the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others. I will then focus on the “two person psychology” of the developmental psychologist, Vasudevi Reddy (Reddy, 2008). Finally, I will illustrate my points with the case of an analytic treatment of a five-year-old boy.

The active role of the infant in infant–caregiver interactions

In a YouTube video of Tronick’s (2007a) still face experiment, the mother and infant share a moment of joyful communication with mutual gaze and smile, and mother makes a delighted vocalization. Immediately afterwards, the infant lifts her chin and averts her gaze, and the mother responds by averting her gaze, while maintaining her smile. After a few seconds, the infant initiates another direct gaze and simultaneously vocalizes, “Da!” in a powerful gesture of engagement. In the minutes that follow, infant and mother establish a rhythm of coordinated mutual attention and breaks in attention, or engagement and disengagement. This coordination continues until the mother assumes the ‘still face,’ at which point the infant becomes distressed and displays numerous signs of dysregulation. The experiment demonstrates the infant’s need for the caregiver’s input in the mutual regulatory process that forms the foundation of the infant’s capacity for self-regulation. In addition, as the video demonstrates, the infant is also exercising her agency as she initiates re-engagement during pauses. The mother’s responses to her baby’s initiatives scaffold the infant’s developing sense of agency.

In Tronick’s model of mutual regulation, infant and mother exchange communications about affect and intention in a repeating pattern of match, mismatch, and repair (Tronick, 2007b). Contrary to earlier views in which the mother was primarily responsible for the coordination of this communication, Tronick demonstrated that the infant initiated cues as often the mother did (Cohn & Tronick, 1988). This discovery created a paradigm shift in which the infant’s early expression of agency was recognized.

Beebe’s “dyadic systems approach” to mother–infant interaction also stresses the bi-directional feature of mother–infant communication (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002, pp. 21–44). The interactive processes between infant and caregiver are fundamental to the development of intersubjectivity and the sense of self, and, congruently, to the development of agency. Beebe describes how the communication of affect occurs through the moment-to-moment coordination of infant and caregiver behavior. This joint coordination is bi-directional, in that each partner contributes to the exchange to create an integrated self- and interactive contingency process. For example, if the mother and infant share a pleasurable and exciting interaction such as a playful touch or tickle, and the infant then averts his gaze and slightly sobers, the mother will typically sit slightly back and dim her expression, waiting for the infant to return to the interaction. It is as if she is responding to the infant’s saying, “I need a break.”

When the mother fails to respond contingently to the infant’s cues, the coordination is disturbed. Sometimes, the mother will continue her exciting gestures and vocalizations despite her infant’s communication that he needs to re-group. This is not necessarily a problem. Tronick emphasizes the “repair” after such a mismatch as a critical part of the “match, mismatch, and repair” pattern of mutual regulation (Tronick, 2007b, pp. 10–11), and Beebe found that interactive contingency of vocal rhythms in insecure dyads was both heightened and lowered compared to secure dyads who were midrange (Jaffe et al., 2001). However if mother and infant are more consistent in their misreading of each other’s cues, problematic patterns may develop. One problematic pattern occurs when the mother ignores or appears to misapprehend the infant’s bid for disengagement. An extreme example of this pattern are when the mother ‘looms’ too close to the infant, or ‘chase and dodge,’ in which the mother pursues the infant, and the infant ‘dodges’ to avoid contact with the mother (Beebe et al., 2012).

It is easy to appreciate how the child’s agency emerges from her ability to both initiate a disengagement from the caregiver, and also initiate a re-engagement. Sander (2008) describes the agency of the individual in dynamic systems terms as “the initiation of self-organizing, self-regulating, self-correcting moves” (p. 218). Sander identifies the origin of the infant’s agency in the specificity of the mutual regulation in the earliest infant–caregiver system. “The extent to which an infant can be an agent in his or her own self-regulation differentiates one infant-caregiver system from another from the outset” (p. 161). In this way, Sander describes the dyadic system of infant and caregiver as the self-organizing system from which the agency of the infant, and the child and adult the infant will become, emerges.

Achieving a coherent sense of self-as-agent – differentiated, valid, and competent within ones context of life support – brings us to a key goal of both the developmental and therapeutic processes. I suggest that the process of achieving a coherent sense of self-as-agent is an example of the way “principles of process in living systems” can be applied to the task of integrating biological, developmental, and therapeutic levels we have been assigned.

(Sander, 2008, pp. 218–219)

Trevarthen also assigns the infant an active role in the development of human intersubjectivity and the individual’s agency. He describes the infant’s awareness of its body’s coordinated movements, and their rhythms as they coordinate with those of the caregiver in an interactive dialogic process he calls “protoconversation” (Trevarthen and Malloch, 2002; Malloch and Trevarthen, 2010, pp. 3–5). In his work with Stephen Malloch Trevarthen has elaborated a concept of communicative musicality (Malloch and Trevarthen, 2010). This concept is beautifully and movingly illustrated in Trevarthen’s videotape of a premature infant being held by his father, who is singing to him. The infant’s tiny foot is swaying rhythmically back and forth in perfect time to his father’s song. It is important to appreciate that Trevarthen’s elements of communicative musicality – pulse, tone, and narrative – convey an emotional story without words. In other words, long before the infant has the capacity to communicate with language or develops the awareness of mental states, it has the motivation and the capacity to communicate with another, a search for coordinated companionship.

Theory of mind

Beginning at about one year old, babies begin to point and engage in joint attention experiences with adults, indicating that they are beginning to appreciate the participation of two minds in a shared activity. Children who request a shared focus of attention, for example by pointing, are demonstrating an awareness that two minds may be engaged by paying attention to the same object or disengaged by paying attention to different objects.

Another step in the development of meanings related to privacy occurs in children who are three to four years old. This cognitive development includes the capacity to attribute mental states to themselves and others and is referred to as ‘theory of mind,’ ‘mentalizing,’ and other names. This cognitive development has been demonstrated by the ‘false belief test’ (Wimmer and Perner, 1983). While not exactly congruent with ‘privacy,’ theory of mind, or mentalizing, they share important attributes in that both presume an awareness of a mental state of the self that can be distinguished from the mental state of the other. Multiple theories have been developed to explain this capacity – the theory-theory, the modularity theory, the rationality, and the simulation theory. I will briefly recognize these perspectives but assume that for our discussion of privacy, Reddy’s ‘two person approach,’ involving engagement and disengagement with another, seems most useful (Reddy, 2008, pp. 26–42).

The theory-theory, or ‘mentalizing’ theory, links observable inputs to certain mental states and mental states to observable outputs. For example, you might assume that people who have been exercising on a hot day would feel thirst, or people who are in pain would like to get relief, or people who are angry would frown. That means you draw conclusions from your observations (Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997). A famous experiment by Wimmer and Perner (1983) demonstrates a striking cognitive change in children between three to four years old, in the ‘false belief task.’ In this experiment, for example, children watch a scenario in which ‘Sally’ puts a doll in a bandaid box and the bandaid in a drawer and walks away. ‘Jane’ enters and says she needs a bandaid. The children are asked to predict where Jane will look for a bandaid. Most three-year-old children will say that she will look for it in the drawer, where Sally put the bandaid, because they assume that their beliefs are shared by Sally. On the other hand, four-year-olds will ascribe to Jane the belief that it is logically in the bandaid box. By four years old, children are able to grasp the idea that a belief can be false. This theory has since been challenged by some, who instead point to the executive control ability of ‘inhibitory control’ that allows someone to override the tendency to assume the perception of reality as the child knows it (Carlson and Moses, 2001). Another challenge to the false belief paradigm is an experiment with simpler – nonverbal – demands. In this case, fifteen-month-old children could accomplish the task (Onishi and Baillargeon, 2005).

A representative of modularity theory is Simon Baron-Cohen, who considers children to have core knowledge that comes online at a certain age without their having to learn it. Baron-Cohen has studied autistic children, whom he believes are lacking this core knowledge about their own and others’ mental states. Baron-Cohen et al. compared Down syndrome children to autistic children and to normal children with the false belief test (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985) and also in their ability to create a coherent narrative out of scrambled comic strip segments (Baron-Cohen et al., 1986). He concluded that autism impairs a domain-specific capacity dealing with mentalizing.

Simulation Theory, sometimes called the ‘empathy’ theory, is based on the idea that individuals try to create similar mental states of their own as a way of understanding mental states of others (Goldman, 1989). Working with Gallese, Goldman proposed a link between this kind of empathy and mirror neurons (Gallese and Goldman, 1998). Mirror neurons are neurons in the premotor cortex that code for a goal-oriented action such as grasping something or taking something to your mouth. These neurons, discovered accidentally in a famous experiment in which the central control of macaques’ motor system was being studied, fire both when the individual plans to perform the action and also when the individual observes another animal or human performing the same action (Gallese and Goldman, 1998; Gallese, 2006). Since then, mirror neurons have also been discovered to moderate not only motor acts, but also sensations and emotions as visualized in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (Keysers et al., 2004; Singer et al., 2004; Morrison et al., 2004). Simulation theory has also been challenged, for example by ‘quarantine failure,’ or ‘egocentric bias,’ that involves the subjectivity of the individual imagining the other’s mental state (Van Boven and Loewenstein, 2003).

To my mind, the most helpful theory to explain the development of privacy is Reddy’s (2008) explanation of the phenomenon of ‘knowing minds’ from a ‘second person point of view.’ She explains that we come to know our own minds and other people’s minds through a dialogic engagement process in which we perceive the other’s state of mind while engaged with it, and then have a chance to perceive our own state of mind in the process of disengaging from the other. Reddy states, “Within active emotional engagement your perception of the other always involves proprioceptive experience of self-feelings-for-other, and your proprioception of the self always involves perception of other-feelings-for-self” (p. 30). Clearly, this process is more consistent with the theories of Tronick, Beebe, Sander, and Trevarthen, who – although there are differences among them – all emphasize the individual’s self-regulation and sense of agency as emerging from reciprocal interactions within the infant–caregiver system.

Reddy refers to Martin Buber’s distinction between the ‘I-Thou’ and ‘I-You’ way of relating to and knowing another person (Reddy, 2008, p. 28; Buber, 1958). Buber sees the ‘I-Thou’ experience of engagement as necessary for a reciprocal dialogue. The ‘I-You’ is a more distant observational position that allows for the individual to find himself within the previous engagement. Again, disengagement provides a valuable dimension to the awareness that is experienced within the engagement. In infancy, it provides an opportunity for self-regulation within the mutual regulatory framework, and for the exercise of agency, when the infant initiates the disengagement. With further cognitive development, disengagement allows for the awareness of a private mental state apart from others, for keeping secrets, and for privacy.

Clinical example

The clinical example from the analysis of a four- to five-year-old boy illustrates the child’s efforts to claim his agency in the context of a perceived threat from me, his analyst. I spontaneously changed the ‘rules of the game’ by taking the role of a dominant character usually played by the child, provoking a perturbation in the system. When I then attempted to make a defense interpretation, the child experienced this more directly as taking away his privacy. “I’m not telling you,” he said in response to my wondering why he said he wanted to leave the session early. “It’s personal.” The way in which the child and I negotiated the challenge to the child’s privacy such that his agency was strengthened while at the same time I had the right to my ‘opinion’ about the contents of his mind, proved to be a transformational moment in the analysis. The example, drawn from videotape sequences of one session in the seventh month of analysis, demonstrates the back and forth self-organizing process described by Tronick, Beebe, Sander, and Trevarthen. This domain of communication, which I have elsewhere referred to as the ‘music and dance’ of therapeutic process, forms the essential backdrop for the communication of verbal and symbolic play (Harrison, 2013).

The boy, whom I call ‘Sean,’ suffered from difficulties in self-regulation and social engagement. Impulsive and disruptive in the classroom and at home, his problem sharing with peers and siblings generated c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributor
• Introduction
• Prologue
• PART I: Developmental realm
• PART II: Cultural realm
• PART III: Clinical realm
• Epilogue
• References
• Index