A plea for a measure of opacity: Psychoanalysis in an age of transparency Annual Birkbeck Counselling Association Lecture December 2018

‘Whatever can be catalogued is an occasion for despair’. Gabriel Marcel (1964 Marcel, G. (1964). Creative Fidelity, trans. R. Rosthai (p. 70). New York: Noonday Press. [Google Scholar]).

Ever since the Enlightenment, knowledge has been linked to the metaphor of light. The idea that ‘to see is to know’ so firmly grounds our current way of being in and understanding the world it is hard to imagine otherwise. But our insistence on open government, freedom of information and the public’s right to know privileges not only the visibility of information but also the visibility of the self. In this paper, I consider how we might think about and respond to the ever-increasing demand for transparency in the consulting room. I draw on the ideas of Derrida, Laplanche and Glissant to argue for what has been called ‘the right to opacity’, suggesting that psychoanalytic practitioners are particularly well placed to offer a critical perspective on today’s culture of surveillance.