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Intimacy — psychoanalysis is a process of intimacy; for the patient, the most intimate process he will encounter in his life. For the analyst, who has already had his own intimacy with his own analyst, psychoanalytic practice continually reviews and relives anew the intimacies of his life. Many are intimidated and disturbed by the intimacy of the analytic process (incomplete analysis). The analytic intimacy of course recreates the mother-child intimacy.
I am fond of rereading the early literature and the proceedings of early meetings of the psychoanalytic movement. These are mostly interpersonal communications of great intimacy with the doubts, the questions, the mistakes and the progressive procedures of discovery. Some of these are also scattered in personal letters and private communications.
As the number of analysts increased, associations grew and multiplied, annual meetings competed with each other, publications became lengthy and voluminous, and communications became by necessity theoretical, statistical and review-bound. (There was nothing to review at the beginning.) In perfecting specialized communications, the flavor of intimacy is lost. Recent psychoanalytic articles, although highly academic and important in theoretical advances, have lost the flavor of intimacy and with it some of their illustrative capacities.
Puerto Rico is an island 100 miles long by 36 miles wide with three million people. San Juan, the capital, has a population of 800,000 and a small group of practitioners. We are only six