Chapter 2: Intimacy in Relational Selfhood

An intimacy crisis is considered to be linked to postmodern self-saturation and to selfhood experienced as needing permanent refurbishing. The present proposal connects intimacy and self-discourse crises by questioning the validity of an approach to self-understanding and to our relationship with others in “inner” versus “outer” terms. To put self-understanding in intimate relationships in either other-oriented or in self-oriented terms puts the person at odds with a sense of self-stability. Such an impasse is examined through an epistemological lens. Disciplinary assumptions permeating psychology are brought out to explore how the study of psychic phenomena and terminology still responds to the tenets of a pictorial theory of truth. An alternative proposal is advanced by adopting a pragmatic and holistic approach to language, personhood, and relationships. A shift in focus toward what has been called the relational-self would avoid reducing intimacy to “mind” terminology, and instead formulate it to self-discourses that organize action at a relational level. Intimacy could then be freed from a prescriptive vocabulary about the self and its constant renewal in relational dynamics could be acknowledged.