PART THREE - Finding Intimacy
Summary
Donald Winnicott once observed that “a sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us” (1986: 117). That is all very well, but he also celebrated the capacity to be alone in the presence of someone else, calling this a “most precious possession” (1958). The pursuit of intimacy, as we have seen, is fraught with paradox. Chapter 9 advises we should pay attention to others and Chapter 10 that we should pay attention to ourselves. Similarly, for Winnicott, to be irresistibly other makes a connection worth having, while threatening the possibility of connection in the first place. It is as though we need impediments if a marriage of true minds is to be worth having. So this sets up the worry that intimacy is in some ways a mirage: a mirage of true minds.
The barriers I outlined in Part 2 can all keep intimacy out of reach. And even without these various barriers the worry that intimacy will elude us is understandable because the lenses through which I looked at intimacy in Part 1, while enabling of it, all have their contradictions too. The reciprocal component requires mutual awareness and reasonably accurate knowledge of each other when attention is fickle and self-serving, and self-knowledge let alone mutual knowingness is such a challenging and changeable task.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- IntimacyUnderstanding the Subtle Power of Human Connection, pp. 185 - 188Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2012