Intimacy

The Shared Part of Me

Edited by:
María Elisa Molina, Universidad del Desarrollo
Carlos Cornejo, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Giuseppina Marsico, University of Salerno
Jaan Valsiner, Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University

A volume in the series: Annals of Cultural Psychology. Editor(s): Giuseppina Marsico, University of Salerno. Jaan Valsiner, Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University.

Published 2022

The concept of intimacy puts forth important challenges to contemporary cultural psychology. Intimacy refers to a felt experience of interiority that although is intuitively comprehensible, does not have rigorously defined limits. Intimacy can refer to a content, an object, a person, ownership, or even a part of one’s own body.

A potentially problematic issue for cultural psychology is that acknowledging intimacy seems to bound the Self to areas disjointed from the social sphere. In a globalized world, we witness a developmental process where social life becomes sectioned, where people are involved in an identity search by foregrounding certain social roles. With this backdrop in mind, people redefine and rebuild their intimacy spaces and the ways they roam from these to the public and collective realm.

Exploring the current historical situation leads us to consider intimacy as culture in the making; certainly, in the way it manifests itself, but particularly in how we approach and understand it. The lived (experienced) dimension of intimacy becomes truly important, since it casts new light on what we mean by intimacy in different spheres of the self’s life, as well as life with others.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments. Introduction: Intimacy From a Cultural-Psychological Standpoint, María Elisa Molina, Carlos Cornejo, Giuseppina Marsico, and Jaan Valsiner. PART I: UNDERSTANDING INTIMACY FROM THE LENS OF CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY. Intimacy in Relational Selfhood, Roberto Arístegui. Intimate Encounters With the Sense of Self in Hinduism, Nandita Chaudhary. Whose Shoes? Intimacy in Self–Other–Culture Relationships, Lívia Mathias Simão. Full Silence as an Intimate Experience With Myself: A Cultural Phenomenological Hermeneutic Point of View, Pablo Fossa and Cristóbal Pacheco. PART II: THE BODY AS A FIELD FOR INTIMACY CONSTRUCTION. Towards a Holistic Approach to Intimacy, Paloma Opazo and Himmbler Olivares. Exploring Intimacy Through Tango in an Embodied Cultural Psychological Vein, Floor van Alphen. Written Under the Skin: Challenges of Intimacy in Contemporary Culture, Marina Assis Pinheiro. PART III: INTIMACY AT THE BORDERS. Common Sense and Routines: Everyday Life Intimacy, David Carré. DisCOVERing Parental Engagement Amidst the Private and the Public Life: Is There a Hole/Whole in the Hat? Dany Boulanger. Elders’ and Children’s Dialogue and Learning in a Canadian Intergenerational Organization: Bridging Private and Public Experience Amidst the School, the Family, and the Community, Dany Boulanger. Conclusions: Intimacy as Unveiling Issues in Dichotomous Thinking, María Elisa Molina, Carlos Cornejo, Giuseppina Marsico, and Jaan Valsiner. About the Editors. About the Contributors.