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Chair: Dana Birksted-Breen
Panellists: Georg Bruns, José Carlos Calich and Rachel B. Blass
Reporter: Clara Nemas
Dana Birksted-Breen stressed in her introduction that the subject of the Congress - intimacy - is not a simple one, even at a descriptive level. She referred to cases in which couples lead a close and loving relationship without sex or conversely couples that base their relation on a perverse engagement in which each of them knows intimately how to reproduce the internal object relationship of each of them, in a sort of perfect fit.
She also brought up the question of what is the meaning of intimacy for analyst and patient within the complex transference-countertransference engagement.
More important, she underlined the necessity to explore where the concept fits into our metapsychology, and where do we find the unconscious in the notion of intimacy.
In order to leave time for a discussion with the audience, the chair called on each of the speakers in turn without interruption.
The panel was opened by Dr José Carlos Calich with a paper titled ‘Intimacy as a Psychic Space and the Source-Intimacy Provoking-Internal-Object’. In his presentation Calich referred first to the non-psychoanalytic origin of the concept stressing that many of its uses in psychoanalytic discussions or texts are not based on a metapsychology. The author's intention is to approach a metapsychology of intimacy, based on a variety of authors but proposing some integration, extensions and modifications of their concepts. The author defines intimacy as a psychic space with a potential capacity of getting in touch, through sincerity and a tolerance to emotionality of the very personal, the most profound, paradoxical or vulnerable aspects of an individual. He describes a three-step development of this capacity: the first develops in the relation of an infant with his primary external object. The second is intrapsychic, with the potential construction of a psychic space which may result in what the