It has become quite frequent lately for politicians to be told they should be ashamed of themselves, even to the point that they should resign. The reasons are sometimes related to their public acts but on some occasions the criticism has been rejected on the ground that it was intruding unduly into the realm of privacy. Others complain that in a culture which was once considered typically Mediterranean, i.e. where honour and shame were taken by anthropologists to dictate behaviour, today all sense of shame seems to have been lost. Do you ever feel ashamed of yourself?

Let me follow last week’s example and tell you a story. I was once invited by a newly appointed ambassador to a reception, obviously intended for self-presentation to people here whom she had been advised to get acquainted with.

I had a busy day and had had no time to prepare a present to give her. So I stopped on the way at a florist’s and was given a few roses wrapped in cellophane.

After ringing the bell of the ambassador’s residence, I noticed there was a price-tag with the florist’s card inside the cellophane pack. To act with necessary speed, I tore the cellophane away to remove the price-tag, but in the process pricked my finger and saw a drop of blood oozing out. At that moment the door opened and two equally elegant ladies appeared.

The most identity-marking difference that I could note between them was that one lady seemed middle-aged and the other in her twenties. Because of this and some slighter hints in their bearing I presented the roses to the elder lady whom I greeted as “Your Excellency” and stuffed the cellophane wrapping into the hands of the younger lady asking her to get rid of it in some way.

The elder lady promptly told me: “I am the maid” and as I turned my eyes apologetically towards the younger lady, I noticed that there was a flowing red streak between the buttons of her white blouse which had obviously been transferred there from my finger.

Her Excellency, who noticed the direction which my eyes went, tried to reassure me by saying: “It doesn’t matter, these things happen.” In Maltese the expression is: I wanted the earth to swallow me. I suddenly realised that I had not introduced myself. So I decided to pretend that I was only a delivery boy and disappeared from the scene as fast as my legs could carry me.

Isn’t that truly a case of feeling ashamed, but not quite in the serious context of its raising questions about where the boundary should be drawn between public and professional behaviour on one side, and the private sphere on the other, that I had in mind when asking you my question?

I certainly thought on the night of the occurrence that it did focus rather precisely the factor that made the most private and intimate experiences be taken by many as again relevant to public and political life – namely, Freud’s psychoanalytic theories.

The ambassador in my story was certainly acquainted with the interpretative technique which the Viennese doctor had developed for slips of the tongue or other unconsciously symbolic behaviour. The smile that hovered on herExcellency’s lips convinced me that she had not only perceived a hidden meaning in my intended handing to her a crumpled mass of waste wrapping as my greeting gesture, but also that my action had said something like: there is blood of my people that you bare on your breast.

In fact, it is generally acknowledged that the diffusion of Freudian theory explains the extraordinary publicity given to even their sexual life by such politicians as Nicolas Sarkozy, since they prefer to project their own self-interpretation before the omnipresent paparazzi get theirs in first.

It is not often realised how recent the idea is that there is a private sphere which even politicians (and priests) have the right to keep shrouded from public scrutiny.

Until the middle of the 19th century, everybody carried out his/her ablutions and his/her excretions in the streets. Bath-tubs only began to be hired for use in homes about the middle of that century and domestic water closets came in even later.

This physical marking out of a boundary between private and public space was accompanied by a sharp frontier drawn up in the spiritual sphere between two sectors of a human being’s life. Its observance varied from culture to culture. It did so more or less in proportion to the extent to which the sense of individuality compared in strength with the sense of community belonging.

Although the war between the two spaces was badly breached with the spread of psychoanalysis, it has probably been destroyed definitely only with the rise of Facebook and the other so called social media.

Besides the public and the private sphere, today there is frequent talk of ‘civil society’ as opposed to governmental or state institutions. How does this nowadays commonly-used term differ from that of private sphere as opposed to the public?

The phrase ‘civil society’ was coined by the philosopher Hegel to refer to those organisations which had a public purpose, such as providing a social service or facilitating youth activities, as opposed to private goals such as individual or group financial gain, as long as the organisations were not state-run or politically dominated.

Thus civil society differs from both non-government and from simply private organisations.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.