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This article is based on the supposition that power and intimacy play a critical role in the development and potential for ongoing growth in both personal and clinical relationships. While defining the distinguishing characteristics of power and intimacy in each context, this article also proposes that in any two-person relationship, analytic or otherwise, the power of intimacy at its best is achieved when there exists a relative balance—acceptable to both participants—in the inevitable dialectic between intimacy and power, a dialectic that cannot remain static and, therefore, requires mutual awareness and tending from moment to moment. Drawing from vignettes extending over 30 years of marriage and clinical practice, this article illustrates ways in which intimacy may flourish or falter in the face of unexamined transferences, primarily looking at how urgencies related to power may set this dialectic
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 16th annual conference, “Behind Closed Doors: The Power of Intimacy in the Personal and Analytic Relationship,” National Institute for the Psychotherapies, New York, February 5, 2005; and at a conference, of the same title, at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, September 17, 2005.
off course and thereby threaten to disrupt either the analytic or personal relationship.