Intimacies

Intimacies

by

Completed: January 1, 2020
★★

Please see my page on Adam Phillips for more. Some quotes below:

Desire…is like being told a secret about oneself that someone else has made up.

It is the contention of this book…that psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy, that intimacy is by definition personal intimacy, and that narcissism is the enemy, the saboteur, of this personal intimacy considered to be the source and medium of personal development.

The question is…what has to happen to the consciousness of loss of power to make it a shameful experience rather than, say, a blissful one? Why, to ask an apparently daft question, would the self want to protect itself from the loss of power, from the consciousness of this loss? Loss of power, after all, might be the precondition for the longed for and feared experience of exchange, of intimacy, of desire indifferent to personal identity.

The first intimacy is an intimacy with a process of becoming, not with a person. The question raised by Bersani’s account is why is this relation so difficult to sustain, so easily sabotaged by the drive to take things personally?

On Henry James’s novella, The Beast in the Jungle (with Marcher and May Bertram as the main characters):

“The answer to all the past is that she was what he had missed.” Marcher and May Bertram are, however, superior to the world only as long as their real selves lie hidden behind the social simpler. If the reality they have been watching for turns out to be the failure to have the intimacy they present to the world, Marcher’s awful fate, his unenviable privilege, has been simply not to live as society would have expected him to live, that is, in an uncomplicated conformity to the requirements of the social simper.

All book cover images are from Goodreads unless specified otherwise.

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