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Psychoanalytic therapy is often initiated as a result of prob-lemed intimacies in the patient's world. Because the patient elaborates a kind of intimacy with the analyst, analytic sessions become a laboratory for exploring how the patient may systematically introduce distortions as intimacies unfold in his or her life. This exploration occurs in accord with the relatively established arrangements of analytic therapy: Times and fees are established, confidentiality assured, the patient talks more or less freely about his or her world, the analyst is comparatively reticent and neutral, and sexual and other extra-therapy involvements are proscribed.
Increasingly, I regard the rigorous structure of the therapy system as enabling an authentic and mutual (though asymmetric) intimacy to arise between patient and analyst. Whereas psychoanalysis is generally experienced by the patient as intimate, an experience organized largely along transferential lines, it is less evident that the treatment process is also experienced by the analyst as intimate. More and more, I am drawn to the view that psychoanalysis is intimate for the analyst, and that this sense of intimacy should not be regarded as solely a consequence of transference distortions in the analyst. In a word, the analyst's sense of intimacy with the patient arises from meaningful attentiveness and responsiveness to the patient within the boundaries of the analyst's role (Horney, 1987; Ingram, 1990, 1991).
Intimacy derives from the Latin root intimus for “inmost,” and the verb intimare means “to drive or to press into” (Schimel, 1987). Contemporary usage holds that intimacy refers to affectionate closeness between two people, a symmetrical sharing of what is personally near to them (Lerner and Jabin, 1990; Tannen, 1990).