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Intimacy is the experience that what one most feels to be one's self has been engaged. If that self is authentic, the experience of intimacy will be authentic. If what one most feels to be one's self is not one's real self, but is instead a “false” (Winnicott, 1960) or “alienated” (Horney, 1950) self as a consequence of some functional psychopathological process, the experience of intimacy will be false.
In health, intimacy is not merely experiential, but describes a quality of a transactional process (Spiegel, 1971): intimacy enables the breaching, and even the dissolving, of those defenses and internal limits that restrict the unity of the self (Nozick, 1981). But more than that, intimacy is a reaching beyond oneself to another (as in the case of personal intimacy) or to a deity (as in Buber's l-Thou) or to an audience (as in the personal revelations of an artist) or even to a beloved pet. Intimacy is not identical with love because it may characterize relations not ordinarily considered love relations, such as the therapeutic relationship. Besides, unlike love, intimacy may bring to mind the meeting of selves that share in a mutuality or in some trusted reciprocity, rather than the uniting of selves, the merging of one into another, that is so often and so mistakenly intended by what we call love.
In the absence of health, intimacy holds many dangers: first, it may threaten character detachment organized initially in the developing child to escape from the disorganizing impact of an impinging mother (Horner, 1979); second, intimacy may threaten to mobilize insufferable self-hate associated with emerging dependency needs; third, when self-sufficiency and detachment are associated with defensive grandiosity and an idealized self, intimacy increases the risk of humiliation; fourth, intimacy, by awakening