Intimacy: The drama and beauty of encountering the Other.

The author begins with general considerations about intimacy in life, the life cycle, and relationships in general. He defines intimacy as an emotional experience of contact with oneself and with another subject. He then focuses on describing the experience of intimacy in the analytic relationship, asserting that the encounter between two subjects and their subjectivities creates an area of emotional turbulence, which, if tolerated, symbolically transformed, and, therefore, thought out, may lead to knowledge about the intimacy of one’s emotions and those of the other person. Thus, the emotion experienced in contact with the Other embodies the link between the two, and allows us to know what is happening within both ourselves and the person with whom we are in contact. The author then proposes a gradient of intimate experiences, ranging between extremes of autistic isolation and narcissistic fusion – at which the experience of intimacy is impossible. Between these two poles lie different degrees of potential intimacy. The study continues by describing the timing of intimacy, seeking, for theoretical purposes, to closely examine the process by which intimacy is constructed in the analytic relationship, as well as obstacles that must be overcome. Finally, clinical vignettes are presented to illustrate how the author characterises experiences of intimacy in the analytic relationship, the anxieties they trigger, and certain defences against intimacy.