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Deborah Anna Luepnitz explicitly sets out to describe the elasticity of human nature, the complex movement between connection and isolation. Luepnitz achieves this goal and imbeds within it another task that makes this book important and compelling reading. In addition to a detailed examination of intimacy and its vicissitudes, this book offers a microscopic observation of cultural process as manifest within the individual. Intimacy's dilemmas are shown to have sociocultural antecedents.
Luepnitz organizes her book around the central metaphor of the porcupine, borrowed from Schopenhauer who used it to delineate the problem with human intimacy. According to Schopenhauer, people are like porcupines that rush together to shield themselves from the cold, only to pierce each other with their quills. The pain they inflict upon each other as they huddle together causes them to break away from the shelter and security of each other's warmth. Luepnitz provides five clinical vignettes to describe the human process of coming together and breaking apart, and the pain caused therein. While the porcupine metaphor strikingly organizes the ideas and language of this book, what is equally exciting is how Luepnitz demonstrates cultural process resonating in the psyche of an individual or couple. The other aspect to Schopenhauer's porcupine metaphor is the role of will, the ability of humans to act on desire rather than reason alone.
Schopenhauer's conception of human will suggests that we are somewhat doomed by our natural tendency to behave like the lesser-evolved porcupines. People, according to Schopenhauer, will continually and repetitively seek sanctuary from the porcupines that quill us. Human tenacity drives