To paraphrase Ernest Jones's comment about love (in his Papers on Psycho-Analysis), “there is much less intimacy in the world than there appears to be”. Jones made his comment at a time when the ideals of human connection were being undermined by Freud's new theories, which showed how divided people were against themselves and from each other. If anything, over the following decades, with the advent of pop music, advertising and Hollywood, a gap between popular imagery and psychological reality has widened. The idea of intimacy is talked about and reinforced in so many ways we could be forgiven for believing it is within easy reach and therefore disappointed to feel it is more readily available to others (even to a dog, a cat and a mouse in a well-known British Gas advert) than ourselves. After all, the rise of social-networking sites puts hundreds of “friends” within a click of a mouse. The illusions belie the truth that intimacy is rare, elusive and short-lived for most of us, for most of the time.

Meanwhile, our ambition to experience intimacy is as strong as ever. A social animal can't help but feel that prolonged separateness is the source of anxiety and, for the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, it leads to shame and guilt because separateness leaves one unable to use human faculties, helplessly unable to grasp the world and so defenceless to its depredations: “The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness” (Fromm 2010: 9).