ABSTRACT
Uneasy intimacy often begins and evolves differently than healthier intimacy does, in that the two individuals become privy to each other's inner world to an excessive degree and at an unduly heightened rate. The closeness is often patently premature. This intensity of degree and rate often fails to take into account other features of the two individuals' roles vis-a-vis each other. These are the features such as age discrepancy, role asymmetry, conflicting ties, value differences, and so forth, which under other circumstances would have modulated their closeness. One reason intimacy is so potentially problematic is that human beings are many-sided, that selfhood is by its nature a multiplicity of internal states and aspects. In Fairbairn's further theorizing, the ego responds to trauma by internalizing the bad object, which splits into exciting and rejecting internal objects; the central ego splits off from itself and then represses two subsidiary aspects, the libidinal ego and internal saboteur.
