You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
For many years, I have felt the psychoanalytic relationship to be intimate despite its obvious asymmetries, its contractual nature, and the necessary constraints required of patient and analyst. Nevertheless, a conservative intellectual preference led me to cleave to conventional terminology, to terms such as relationship, transference, and alliance (Gutheil and Havens, 1979). These are all adequate terms, but none of them, I have continued to believe, possess quite the texture of meaning that the term intimacy connotes.
As I began to consider if intimacy could be put forth boldly as a legitimate attribute of the analytic process, I was concerned that intimacy suggests closeness, warmth, sexuality, and sharing. Intimacy unlike, say, alliance may feel dangerously personal, and in this era when accusations of sexual misconduct concern all practitioners, speaking of the analytic relationship as intimate may be frightening. On the other hand, perhaps we are more truly served by a term that is more immediately personal.
In continuing to think generally about the structure of intimacy, I began to develop some intellectual understanding of how we might legitimately regard intimacy as part of the analytic relationship, even to the point of wondering if it might be the intimacy that contributes to therapeutic effectiveness (1986, 1990). If there is something like a “therapeutic intimacy” that arises between analyst and patient, how can we approach it theoretically? How, if legitimate, does it help? How does it change as analytic therapy proceeds?
Although I want to sketch some responses to these questions, it is my