The rhetoric of intimacy

Abstract

According to the Manchu Chinese, the five necessary ingredients for a successful life were longevity, tranquility, virtue, wealth and the fulfillment of one's destiny. You will note that nothing whatever was said about intimacy, relatedness, sharing, authenticity, or togetherness. The former were, of course, the verities of a Confucian society; order, duty and social participation. This is still true of many contemporary societies where intimacy may well be the capacity to live six in a room without killing one another. Nevertheless, in our affluent society and with our Judeo-Christian humanistic heritage, intimacy is unquestionably a powerful desiratum. Intimacy, though, is a bit like prosperity. Everybody is for it, but its vagueness of definition and attainment make it an elusive concept indeed. Moreover, like prosperity, the concept lends itself to political platforming and, not infrequently, it turns out that one person's intimacy is another's symbiosis. Even the word itself has a long history of ambiguity and changing meaning. E tymologically, it derives from the Latin, intimus, meaning within. In its earlier literary usage, it described the most private and unrevealed parts of the person; as in, I did not dare reveal my most intimate thoughts or, he removed my intimate garments. Intimacy implied a willingness to expose one's private inner self. It was not the concept of a process between people, the complex representation of mutual relatedness that it later became. Over the eight decades of psychoanalytic development, there has occurred, as frequently happens~ an inversion of the original meaning of the word from something inside to something outside, from most inner to most in between, from a statement of place to a statement of process, from an essentially intrapsychic concept to an essentially interpersonal one. So that now, when we talk about intimacy we are referring to an optimal state of felt relatedness, a concept almost easier to experience than to describe or define. There is virtually no decent definition of intimacy in the psychoanalytic literature, or in most writings, although the concept is widely used. In Althea Homer's excellent book, Being and Loving (1978), it is assumed as an a priori understanding. Erik Erikson {1968) and Harry Stack Sullivan {1953) are two analysts who most frequently use the concept, particularly in reference to adolescent crises. Yet Erikson offers no adequate definition and Sullivan defines intimacy as the