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Recent rumors of the death of intimacy have been greatly exaggerated. At least this is the message one might take away from a new book edited by Alan Frank, Patricia Ticineto Clough, and Steven Seidman entitled Intimacies: A New World of Relational Life (Routledge, 2013). Although a much larger and more sensationalistic body of research and speculation has emerged over the past couple of decades warning of the decline of deep personal relatedness among young people raised on social media and information technologies (Baym, 2010; Carr, 2010; Gardner & Davis, 2013; Healy, 1998; Radziwell, 2010; Small & Vorgan, 2008; Steiner-Adair, 2013; Turkle, 2011; Weiss & Schneider, 2014), this group of scholars, social theorists, and psychoanalysts propose an alternative view. For them, intimacy can no longer be measured by some rigid 20th-century heterocentric standard of romantic love and personal closeness. Rather, it is a robust and polymorphous phenomenon.
Unlike Intimacies (2008) of Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, which was an erudite dialogue with a French poststructural edge aimed at the psychoanalytic community, the audience for this work is broader and the subjects traversed are more diverse. Nevertheless, some of the same territory covered by Bersani and Phillips is explored here. This Intimacies contains papers by prominent scholars and therapists, but it is not a unified philosophic discourse. The book is accessible to readers from various disciplines. This is what makes it especially valuable.
In this collection of beautifully crafted essays, the editors have made it a point to “cross boundaries.” By this I mean that they have reached beyond the typical preserve of psychoanalytic thinking to include other ways of examining this most important subject. Among the contributors to this work are outstanding representatives from fields like anthropology, history, sociology, feminist and women’s
studies, queer theory, literature, and psychoanalysis. Many of the authors have