ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the experience of intimacy from a psychoanalytic point of view. It presents the ideas both theoretically and in clinical experience with couples. The momentary sense of identity, however, is marked by "sincerity", due to its link with, or expression of, emotion. Commitment to this identification rests upon the emotions of the depressive position, especially gratitude and the desire for worthiness. The intimacy that is based on an infantile sense of identity requires that each partner to that intimacy meet in a shared arena of unconscious phantasy. A genuine capacity to "parent" the other in moments of intimacy, when it is possible to reveal an infantile sense of identity to the other while needing the other to be parental, is dependent on an introjection of a combined whole-object parental-couple-in-coitus. "Projective identification" remains a term used in different ways in the psychoanalytic literature.
