Intimacy and the Psychotherapy of Adolescents

Abstract

The concept of ``intimacy'' is a little-used one in the analytic literature. The Standard Edition (Freud, 1974) does not contain a single reference to the subject. There are only two citations to the subject in Grinstein's (1960, 1966, 1975) ``Index of Psychoanalytic Writings,'' this in spite of the fact that clinicians regularly describe their patients as having problems with intimacy. The major references to the subject are to be found in Erikson (1968), who defines it as a ``normative crisis'' in the process of the development of identity, and in Sullivan (1953), who defines it in motivational terms as the ``need for interpersonal intimacy.'' It should be noted that these two major theoreticians place the special significance of this concept during that stage of life we call adolescence.