Emotion, Space and Society 13 (2014) 65e70

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Emotion, Space and Society

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s ev i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / e m o s p a

Between two intimacies: The formative contexts of individual experience

John Russon
Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada N1G 2W1

article info abstract

Article history: While it is essential that we live as self-defined individuals, independently negotiating with an inde-pendent reality, this
Received 15 May 2013 Received experience is not exhaustive of our reality. Such experience is importantly contextualized by two other kinds of experience,
in revised form 23 December each an experience of intimacy. First, independent individuality depends upon a process of childhood development in which
2013 Accepted 28 December
identity is formed through a familial intimacy in which the child lives from a non-reflective, bodily sense of a sharedness of
2013
identity with another (typically, but not necessarily, the mother). Second, independent individuality finds its healthy
Available online 6 February 2014
development in the establishment of new intimate bonds; these adult intimacies, unlike childhood intimacy, are bonds between
persons who themselves have developed the sense of inde-pendent individuality and thus have experiential characteristics
Keywords:
Intimacy
significantly different from those of childhood intimacy. From a developmental perspective, each of these two forms of
Individuality intimacy is something good in itself but also something whose good resides in its enabling of something else, childhood in-
Childhood development timacy facilitating the transformation into independent individuality and adult intimacy facilitating a transformative
Embodiment engagement with one’s own limitations.
Phenomenology
Maturity
2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
In an important and essential way, we live as self-defined in-dividuals,
independently negotiating with an independent reality. While this is essential
to our reality, it is not, however, exhaustive of it. This experience of
independent, self-reliant individuality is, I argue, importantly contextualized
by two other kinds of experi-ence, each of which is an experience of intimacy.
First, our inde-pendent individuality depends upon a process of childhood
development in which our identities are formed through an experience of
familial intimacy in which we, as children, live from a non-reflective and
bodily sense of a sharedness of identity with another, (typically, but not
necessarily, the mother). Second, our independent individuality finds its
healthy adult development in the establishment of new intimate bonds in
which we again live from a sense of sharedness of identity; these adult
intimacies, un-like childhood intimacy, are bonds between persons who them-
selves have developed the sense of independent individuality and thus have
experiential characteristics significantly different from those of childhood
intimacy. I will specifically consider how, from a developmental perspective,
each of these two forms of intimacy is something good in itselfdsomething
that is inherently desirable
and worthwhiledbut also something whose good resides in its character as
enabling something else: it is essential that each form of intimacy enable
transformation and growth, childhood intimacy facilitating our transformation
into independent individuals and adult intimacy facilitating our transformative
engagement with our own limitations.
My interpretation of personal development will largely rely upon the
phenomenological method of investigation, which ap-proaches the
interpretation of the person through a description of lived experience. I will
describe “from the inside” various charac-teristic forms of human experience,
as these have been docu-mented in the empirical research of a range of 20th-
Century phenomenologists, psychoanalysts and developmental psycholo-
gists. Through describing these experiences, I will reveal the re-lationships of
self to other selves and of self to world that are implicit in and integral to
these experiences. My analysis is pri-marily a study of interpersonal
relationshipsdfamily relationships, romantic relationships and so ondand such
relationships can take extremely varied forms. My analysis does not presume
any particular form of familial or romantic life to be normative, but
investigates instead the structures that characterize these forms of relationship
as such, in order to reveal what is at stake for us in the way we cultivate such
relationships. I thereby provide a model for understanding the essential role of
intimacy in human life in principle, in a way that is relevant to the rich
multiplicity of the

E-mail addresses: jrusson@uoguelph.ca, jrusson36@yahoo.com.

1755-4586/$ e see front matter 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2013.12.015
66 J. Russon / Emotion, Space and Society 13 (2014) 65e70
forms of interpersonal life, well beyond the limits of the Western nuclear
familiar or heteronormative monogamy.
2. Childhood intimacy
Whenever we act, we rely upon our ability to have our hands move, or our
arms move or our legs move when we want them to. Even to think or to
formulate an explicit intention to ourselves requires that our brain functions
(in a mysterious way we never experience directly) when we want it to, and
so on. Action only happens if there is an immediate identity between my will
and my body: the very fabric of my hands has to be medit has to be me
1 7
grabbing, me feeling, me turning as my body turns. To the extent that we are
agents, then, there is some domain of reality to which we must have an
essentially non-alienated ontological relationship, namely, that part of my
body that is going to have to move when I will it to. There is thus an intimacy
between myself as a subject and the material stuff of the real, which is a
precondition for experience and which must be ontologically prior to the
2 growing bond with the larger immediate family/community that the child is
experience of myself as alienated from the world.
Beyond the minimal experience of moving our hands and so on, in our
everyday life we constantly feel that we have a similar kind of intimate
relationship with reality when we draw on things upon which we depend:
those tools, those parts of the world, that we act from rather than those parts
3 a sense of belonging with another person, in fact one of the crucial things that
of the world that are the objects of our attention and that we are acting upon.
To act and to live, we fundamentally need to be at home in things: they need
4 “I’m entitled to be here, it is proper for me to be here, I am of a piece with it.”
to be where we are. And within this broader theme of our being at home in
things, we can recognize that other people can play that same metaphysical
role for us that the hand does or the clothing or the typewriter or any other
tool does, that is, there are people we “live from,” people who form our
platform for action rather than being the objects of our actions. It is the
establishing of this intersub-jective intimacy, this “making a home in other
people,” that is the decisive issue in childhood.
“Childhood” is not simply a convenient label that we apply to persons
between the chronological limits of, say, zero and eight or ten years of age;
nor is childhood simply a biological category, identifying the period of
organic development prior to puberty. Beyond simple chronology and
biology, childhood is also a distinctive form of experience.
Phenomenologically, childhood can be defined as a form of experiencing that
is characterized by different forms of subject-object relationships than those
which define adult experience. It is this phenomenological analysis of
childhood that I am pursuing here, especially for the purpose of showing how
it is that the form our childhood experiences of intimacy takes is formative of
our developed, adult lives.
Our healthy development is crucially dependent upon good experiences of
interpersonal intimacy in childhood: the establish-ing of a sense of sharedness
of experience with the immediate family (or equivalent, other situations of
upbringing) is crucial to
1 This is the fundamental idea behind Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “lived body” [le corps
propre or le corps vécu]; see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Part One,
Chapter 1 and 3. See also John Russon, “The Spatiality of Self-Consciousness.”
2 For a strong, contemporary discussion of the inherently embodied character of subjectivity,
see Scott Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjec-tivity, Chapter 1, pp.
11e38.
3 On the “from-to” relationship see Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, pp. xviii, 11 and
passim. This analysis is fundamentally based upon Heidegger’s analysis of “readiness to hand”
[Zuhandenheit]; see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 96e 102.
4 Compare Heidegger’s fundamental notion that human being is “Dasein,” “there-being,”
Being and Time, pp. 27, 78e86. For extensive discussion of this notion of “Dasein,” see John
Russon and Kirsten Jacobson, “Heidegger and Space.”
5
our personal formation. This childhood intimacy with others, though, is not
an interpersonal connection in contrast to an engagement with things; on the
contrary, definitive of childhood experience is the fact that it is a process
simultaneously of growing into the world, growing into a shared experience
with someone else (a primary care-giver), and growing into a sense of self.
For the child, the experience of learning to walk or of exploring a new room,
for example, is in large part the experience of doing some-thing with, or with
6
the support of, “momma” or “pappa.” Walking, in other words, is not just a
separate relationship between the child learning to navigate her or his organic
body and space, but is a way of venturing forth within the terms of a shared
life: the very floor and the very process of walking are developments of
intimacy, developments of that shared inhabitation of the world. Let us
consider what is at stake for the child in this initial experience of intimacy.
It is within this experience of a bond with a primary caregiver and a
offered its primary resources for developing (1) a sense of courage, to feel
able to venture forth and explore; (2) a sense of propriety, to feel that it is
proper to do thisdthat the world is rightly understood as my place; that it is
fitting that I take it as my domain and my dwelling; and related to this, (3) a
sense of belonging, of being a real and welcome “part” of “what’s
8
happening.” Crucially, that is, though we might initially think of intimacy as
this interpersonal intimacy has to convey is a sense of belonging to the world:
9
And, to the extent that the child’s explorations of the world are in fact the
development of its shared sense of being with someone, the child is being
initiated into a sense of the world as a place for us, as a place where there are
other people, as a place for shared living. These are the crucial, human
lessons that need to be coming from the experience of the primal bond of
childhood.
Note, though, that these lessons of primal intimacy, are not just matters
for the child as such: these characteristics of self-reliant confidence in dealing
with a world in which it is proper to me to act are, rather, the crucial
parameters of the way an independent adult individual experiences herself in
relation to the worlddthey are precisely the dimensions of experience that
define “indepen-dence.” Without a secure sense of world as a place where it is
proper for one to act, without a secure sense of oneself as someone who can
go forth and do something creative and transformative, without a secure sense
of the world as a place where one shares life
5
For this theme in general, see Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,”
especially on the theme of “syncretic sociability.” On the essential and primary intimacy with
the other, see Eva-Maria Simms, “Milk and Flesh: A Phenomenological Reflection on Infancy
and Coexistence,” Chapter 1 of The Child in the World, and Daniel N. Stern, The First
Relationship: Infant and Mother. See also D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, pp. 15e20. The
idea that the inner life of the child is shaped through the experience of the mother is also central
to the works collected in Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works
1921e1945.
6 See D.W. Winnicott, “First Experiments in Independence”. Compare Eva Simms, “The
World’s Skin Ever Expanding: Spatiality and the Structures of Child Con-sciousness,” Chapter 2
of The Child in the World, p. 35: “To venture into the un-known means at first to be tethered by
an immediate parental anchor that makes the world safe.”
7 Compare Kym Maclaren, “Embodied Perceptions of Others as a Condition of Selfhood?”
8 The theme of the development of courage is studied in John Russon, “The Virtues of
Agency: A Phenomenology of Confidence, Courage and Creativity.” The theme of the
development of a sense of propriety/property is considered in John Russon, Bearing Witness to
Epiphany, Chapter 4, pp. 94ff.
9 This is the central idea behind R.D. Laing’s analysis of “ontological insecurity” in
The Divided Self, pp. 17e61.
 J. Russon / Emotion, Space and Society 13 (2014) 65e70
with other people, one is fundamentally crippled in one’s ability to be a
10
functioning independent adult. It is thus the initial experi-ences of
childhood intimacy that precisely lays the parameters for the healthy
experience of independent individuality.
The experience of childhood intimacy, then, shows that we do not exist as
discrete individuals separate from other people and separate from the world;
rather my sense of myself as a discrete individual, that sense of my separation
from other people, my sense of the world, all grow up together through an
experience that has precisely the opposite sense, an experience, namely, that
is initially simultaneously and indistinguishably an experience of world,
others and self. But at the same time, the experience of indepen-dent
11
individuality is precisely the experience this intimacy is growing up into.
The parameters of the discrete individual facing the objective world are, so to
speak, the telos of that experience of intimacy.
This experience of childhood intimacy is a good in itself in that having
that experience of shared intimate living with our loved ones in our home is
itself healthy and desirable and it is important as such for the child. What it is
crucial to see, though, is that this intimacy is also an enabling experience: it is
not just good in itself but, further, has work to do in our human development
in that it is the essential context for supporting the development of those di-
mensions of selfhood that allow one to function as an independent adult
operating in the objective world. Let us conclude this first section by reflecting
on how this education into individuality is accomplished.
First, this enabling of individuality that intimacy offers the child is
essentially accomplished in and as the communication to the child of a kind of
self-interpretation. This is not a theoretical self-interpretation, in the form of
someone saying the sentence that “you are an agent in the world who can
function well and take things on”; but an emotional self-interpretation, a
bodily self-interpretation, a practical self-interpretation, communicated to the
12
child, through touch, through bodily interaction, and so on. Second, this
intimate communication with our mothers or fathers or other primary
caregivers is carried out through inherently spe-cific (i.e., non-universal)
means: through the ways we get dressed, the ways we gather at dinner time,
the ways we learn to use the toilet, and so on. Precisely because it is not
theoretical, but is practical, bodily, emotional and so on, the communication is
carried out in these idiosyncrasies of how we interact. For the developing
child, though, these practices are not appropriated as idiosyncratic or optional,
but as the essential fabric of its engagement with the world and, inasmuch as
the intimate communication therein accomplished is the matrix within which
our individuality is
10 On the theme of the experiential crippling produced by a lack of such experi-ences of
childhood intimacy, the classic studies are by René A. Spitz, “Hospital-ismdAn Inquiry Into the
Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood,” “The Psychogenic Diseases in
InfancydAn Attempt at Their Etiological Classifica-tion,” and The First Year of Life; compare
Anna Terruwe and Conrad Baars, Psychic Wholeness and Healing: Using All the Powers of the
Human Psyche. See also Kirsten Jacobson, “ Agoraphobia and Hypochondria as Disorders of
Dwelling.”
11 See D.W. Winnicott, “Ego Integration in Child Development” in The Maturational
Processes and the Facilitating Environment, pp. 56e63; and “Playing: Creative Ac-tivity and the
Search for the Self,” and “Creativity and Its Origins” in Playing and Reality, pp. 53e64 and
65e85. For discussion of these ideas, see Thomas H. Ogden, “The Mother, the Infant and the
Matrix.”
12 See E.E. Maccoby, “The Role of Parents in the Socialization of Children: An Historical
Overview,” G. Kochanska, “Mutually Responsive Orientation Between Mothers and Their
Young Children,” and N.T. Termine and C.E. Izard, “Infants’ Response to Their Mothers’
Expressions of Joy and Sadness.” Compare D. W. Winnicott, “The Concept of a Healthy
Individual,” p. 29: “Much of the physical part of infant caredholding, handling, bathing, feeding,
and so ondis designed to facilitate the baby’s achievement of a psyche-soma that lives and
works in harmony with itself.”
67
forged, our adult identity is founded upon an intimate connection with a
history of very specific practices from which we cannot separate our
13
identity. We are especially familiar with this in the case of language: we
grow into our languagedFrench, Arabic, Marathi or whateverdand indeed into
a particular dialect, partic-ular vocal gestures, facial gestures and so on: with
these, we can never not have an intimate connection, and, indeed, we cannot
14
separate this sense of our native tongue from our sense of our-selves. This
relationship to our native tongue is paralleled in much more personal ways in
our relationship to the idiosyncratic prac-tices of eating, dressing, playing and
so on to which we were habituated though intimacy of our childhood, familial
life.
In sum, then, our independent individuality is itself ontologi-cally
dependent upon experiences of primal intimacy within which it is, so to
speak, “nursed.” Our independence thus rests on de-pendency, our detached
individuality rests on sharing, our “being for ourselves” rests upon our “being
with others.” This primal in-timacy itself is enacted materially with specific
others in specific practices and locales, and it is these specificities that are the
“lan-guage” through which our sense of self is communicated to us and it is
our lived experience of these communicative specificities of childhood
intimacy that forms the irreducible fabric of our adult identities. Let us turn
now to consider a second and equally essential form of intimacy, namely, the
intimate relationships that develop between adults.
3. Adult intimacy
Childhood intimacy reveals a being-with-others, a sharing, that is
ontologically prior to our detached individuality, and the romantic, erotic
bonds of adult intimacy similarly present a meta-physical challenge to our
sense of isolated individuality. In adult experiences of developing intimate
relationships with other people we similarly dip our hands into reality and
reconfigure it: we change something of what it is to be ourselves. If this were
not so, we would always see these relationships as exclusively matters of
contract, as matters where people who remain separate come to agreements
about things they will do together, but those con-tracted relationships would
not in fact have an impact on the reality or the identity or the nature of those
individuals. In fact, however, our erotic and romantic relationships do
transform our sense of ourselves and do transform our identities such that, in
a way analogous to the experience of the child, when we grow up and
establish bonds, we come to live from a sharedness of participation in the
15
world analogous to the one the child has with its mother. And, like
childhood intimacy, this adult intimacy is both a good in itself and something
that is good in its enabling capacity.
We saw above that the experience of childhood should even-tuate into our
becoming independent, autonomous individuals. It should result in us
stepping out of various kinds of experiences of dependence towards
experiences of independence: experiences of acting independently and also,
importantly, recognizing the inde-pendence of the world. Though childhood
experience reveals that our experience of the world is importantly not
separated from our sense of ourselves (and I have used this fact to challenge
our common presumption of the separation of self and world), in fact
13 This is the central topic of John Russon, Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis and
Everyday Life; see especially pp. 94e121.
14 On the theme on the intimate connection of identity and native language, emphasizing
especially cultural identity, see Joshua Fishman, Reversing Language Shift, pp. 4e5, and “What
Do You Lose When You Lose Your Language?” See also Tove Skuttnab-Kangas and Robert
Phillipson, ‘“‘Mother Tongue’.”
15 The nature and dynamism of erotic pairing is discussed in more detail in John Russon,
Bearing Witness to Epiphany, Chapter 4, pp. 71e94.
68 J. Russon / Emotion, Space and Society 13 (2014) 65e70
we precisely need to learn that the world is separate from us: we need to learn
that the world does, at least in some respects, present us with a surface of
16
indifference that does not care about us. That is the reality to which we will
have to answer if we want to build an airplane that actually will stay up in the
air, the reality according to which we will get sick (and to which we must
answer if we want to develop effective medical practices to deal with such
sickness), and, ultimately, the reality according to which we will die. Indeed,
as children, we are in fact dependent upon our caregivers handling exactly
this aspect of reality on our behalf. The initial experience of intimacy
succeeds in cultivating in us the ability to have and to handle on our own the
experience of the indifference of an inde-pendent world.
Growing up into that experience of independent individuality is highly
desirabledpeople are typically very pleased to experience themselves as
autonomous selves and to feel competent and capable of interacting with the
world itselfdand yet this experi-ence of the appeal of saying “I’m on my own
now” typically does not last a lifetime. Typically, and maybe even from the
17
start, we still seek a kind of sharing. Though typically we do not want to
continue to live exclusively in that shared intimacy from which we emerged,
it yet remains a crucial dream of our psyche to be able to share the world
18
somehow. This dream is enacted in our erotic and romantic bonds.
An important difference between our experiences of adult and childhood
intimacy, and part of the reason that, as adults, we want to develop our
companionships on our own, is that it is precisely our own experiences that
we want to share: as an adult, I want someone to share my experience and I
want someone to be sharing in the life that I lead. As an adult, one finds
oneself in a private, personal, individual point of view, with one’s own
aspirations, one’s own beliefs about the world, one’s own fears, one’s own
desires, and it is these things about which we would say “my own” that we
want to share. Indeed, that is why we would say we want “intimate” relations:
we want to have a relationship that is about what is intimate and personal to
me and about what is intimate and per-sonal to you. It is when we thus share
my “I”-ness and your “you”-ness that we really feel that we are sharing what
we do.
Like childhood bonds, adult bonds are not “theoretical” matters, and their
initial development is typically not a particularly inten-tional matter: we find
ourselves drawn to certain people, and the communicating of that sharedness
19
is accomplished in emotional, bodily, practical ways. Unlike childhood
bonds, however, the content of that sharing, if it is going to be satisfying and
healthy, is going to have to come from those unique features that characterize
our individual perspectives, features that are different from those that
characterize the child’s perspective because the issues and concerns of the life
of an adult individual are not alive for the child.
16 This is what Freud identified as the shift in development from orientation by the “pleasure
principle” to orientation by the “reality principle.” See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its
Discontents, Chapter 2.
17 The psychological drama of this desire is beautifully portrayed in by Anne Carson in her
verse novel, The Autobiography of Red.
18 We generally recognize it as pathological when an individual seeks to remain permanently
in a childish bond of dependence upon her or his mother and, parallel to this, we think it a
fundamental failing of parenting to seek to cultivate such an attitude in one’s children. For a
popular, contemporary discussion of this theme, see Barbara Hofer and Abigail Sullivan Moore,
The iConnected Parent.
19 Compare Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 159: “Erotic percep-tion is not a
cogitatio that intends a cogitatum; through one body it aims at another body, and it is
accomplished in the world, not within consciousness.. There is an erotic ‘comprehension’ that is
not of the order of the understanding, given that the understanding comprehends by seeing an
experience under an idea whereas desire comprehends blindly by linking one body to another.”
This is relevant to understanding these adult intimate relationships as “goods.”
On the one hand, these relationships again are goods in them-selvesdthey
are inherently desirable dimensions of life that give us an immediate and
ongoing pleasure and supportdbut they also need to be enabling. Specifically,
they precisely need to enable us to carry on our lives as independent, adult
individuals. Though these bonds, like childhood bonds, counter the
detachedness of our adult existence with a shared experience, it is important
that this new intimacy not be a submerging of the very personality that was to
be the site of this intimacy: we want and we need our adult intimacies
precisely to empower the “me” that goes out separately, the me that goes out
into the world as an individual. A characteristic problem in intimate adult
relationships is allowing the sharing that is constitutive of intimacy to efface
the individuality from which it initially sprang: when we satisfy our need for
intimacy as such, i.e., for intimacy itself as a good, in ways that can either
stifle or simply not speak to the needs of our independent adulthood, and we
are forced to develop a split in our lives between where we get our “dose” of
intimacy and where we carry on what is essentially our private life. That is
unsatisfying and unhealthy, both for the indi-vidual and for the intimacy. As
adults, we do and should, in prin-ciple, have a desire for what are called our
“intimate relationships” to be truly intimate, a desire truly to engage around
those issues that we experience as defining us as persons, and thus to support
our independence rather than to oppose it. This feature of adult intimacy
points to two interesting characteristics of adult intimacy that can seem
counter-intuitive, given our childhood expectations of intimacy as a seamless
bond with another.
First, if it is true that as adult individuals we operate with moral views,
professional aspirations, theoretical commitments, and so on, then those
views, aspirations and commitments are going to be alive, and should be
alive, in our intimate relationships. Views, aspirations and commitments,
however, are the sorts of things that involve taking sides in controversies,
grappling with evidence, working, struggling, and so on. We should therefore
expect that our experience of adult intimacy will itself be marked by work,
con-troversy, and struggledindeed, perhaps by opposition. In adult life, then,
intimacy and opposition are not opposed. Though our intimate bonds are not
“theoretical” matters, we as adults crucially define ourselves through our
theoretical commitments, and we should therefore expect that in adult
relationships we will disagree with each other and fight with each other, and
do so on matters of principle, because that theoretical life is part of “what we
are about” as adult individuals.
Because we as individuals really do in part form views and form desires
based on evaluationdwe evaluate evidence, we feel certain responsibilities,
we are governed by certain normsdwe will therefore confront in our partners
people who, presumably, will in some cases have similar views and norms
and expectations and evaluations to our own, but will in other ways not, and
this latter fact will presumably be part of those things over which we will
clash, whether comfortably or uncomfortably. But, and this is the second
interesting characteristic of adult intimacy, we should also expect that, to the
extent that we are serious in our adult identities, our relationships will be
characterized by the expectation that our perspectives and commitments can
change. (Of course, if each person expects only the other partner to change
then that will itself no doubt be a site of struggle.) Fundamentally, then, we
should expect our adult relationships to be sites where part of what makes
them intimate is that in them we are open to be challenged in our sense of
who we are as adult persons, inasmuch as we are persons with commitments
trying to be connected with other persons with commitments. The explicit
beliefs with which we enter our re-lationships are certainly matter for
challenge, but there are also
 J. Russon / Emotion, Space and Society 13 (2014) 65e70
other, more “intimate” ways in which we should expect to be challenged by
intimacy, other boundaries that will have to be transgressed.
Intimacy challenges boundaries in the obvious sense that the boundaries
of individual body, space and property that one relies upon in individual
experience must all be overcome if two (or more) persons are to embrace
sexually, to co-habit, and in general to enact a shared living, and inasmuch as
we have deep emotional attachments to the individuality we enact through
this personal “materiality,” intimate embrace can be just as much emotionally
threatening as it is exciting. From our study of childhood intimacy, however,
we have already learned more about the “personal ma-teriality” of our
“intimate” identities. As children, we grew up living from an idiosyncratic set
of the practices through which our sense of self-identity was communicated to
us by our intimate caregivers, and so our innermost core (captured in the
German term for in-timacy, “Innigkeit”) is precisely embodied as the strange
specific-ities of our bodily, practical and emotional life. If we thus connect
with each other intimately, we will not just be connecting at the level of our
adult ideas about how to live responsibly, but also at the level of our deep
20
psychological strangeness. This situation brings challenges on both sides.
Even in the context of excellent upbringing, we should expect that we will
have some “hang ups,” and, in the more likely situation of an upbringing that
was less than excellent, we can anticipate more substantial difficulties
wrapped up in this dimension of our lives. Because truly intimate adult
relationships will engage us at this level, we will find ourselves required to
confront the troubles that we carry forward from our childhood formation.
Adult in-timacy will thus be challenging in requiring us to confront things
about ourselves that we otherwise do not bring to view, and it will also be
challenging in requiring us to confront such features in another person as
well. Whether or not any given pair of adults does explicitly engage with
these issues, they are on the horizon of adult intimacy in principle, and,
generally, how healthy and ful-filling a relationship is will be determined by
21
how well it grapples with these matters.
Adult intimacy, then, is healthy when it supports our adult in-dividuality,
but in that respect it is a site of opposition, challenge and transformation as
much as a site of comfort and rest. And because truly intimate relationships
should bring us into contact with that original and idiosyncratic intimacy in
which we were formed, we should expect that the intimacy we develop with
another adult will always have to take a unique form if it is indeed to be
responsive to the unique demands, concerns and expectations that come from
the uniquely formed individuals involved.
4. Conclusion
We typically imagine ourselves to be detached individuals fac-ing an
independent, objective world. While this is a correct description of the form
that much of our experience take-sdspecifically, our adult experiencedit is
insufficient as an account of our fundamental nature. Prior to our independent
individuality is a shared experience in which our own identity is not clearly
distinguished from that of our primary caregiver and this experi-ence of a
“we” is not clearly distinguished from our experience of the world. It is the
healthy functioning of these childhood situations
20 Victor W. Eisenstein (ed), Neurotic Interaction in Marriage, is a classic collection that
demonstrates that we bring our neuroses with us into our intimate relationships.
21 This theme is studied substantially in James Masterson, The Search for the Real
Self.
69
of intimacy that is essential to the healthy formation of our adult individuality.
Our adult individuality, further, typically contextual-izes itself by further
experiences of intimacy. These novel enact-ments of a new intimacy are
themselves essential to our existential health as adults, providing us a context
of shared experience in which we are empowered in our independent agency
and prompted to self-transformative self-reflection. In these very con-crete
ways, our healthy “being for self” is dependent upon a fundamental “being
with others.”
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