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 ones 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 selfs life, as well as life with others.
Acknowledgments.
Introduction: Intimacy From a Cultural-Psychological Standpoint; Marķa Elisa
Molina, Carlos Cornejo, Giuseppina Marsico, and Jaan Valsiner.
Part I. Understanding Intimacy From The Lens Of Cultural Psychology.
Chapter
1. Intimacy in Relational Selfhood; Roberto Arķstegui.
Chapter
2. Intimate Encounters With the Sense of Self in Hinduism; Nandita
Chaudhary.
Chapter
3. Whose Shoes? Intimacy in Self-Other-Culture Relationships; Lķvia
Mathias Simićo.
Chapter
4. 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.
Chapter
5. Towards a Holistic Approach to Intimacy; Paloma Opazo and Himmbler
Olivares.
Chapter
6. Exploring Intimacy Through Tango in an Embodied Cultural
Psychological Vein; Floor van Alphen.
Chapter
7. Written Under the Skin: Challenges of Intimacy in Contemporary
Culture; Marina Assis Pinheiro.
Part III. Intimacy At The Borders.
Chapter
8. Common Sense and Routines: Everyday Life Intimacy; David Carré.
Chapter
9. DisCOVERing Parental Engagement Amidst the Private and the Public
Life: Is There a Hole/Whole in the Hat? Dany Boulanger.
Chapter
10. 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.
Chapter
11. Conclusions: Intimacy as Unveiling Issues in Dichotomous
Thinking; Marķa Elisa Molina, Carlos Cornejo, Giuseppina Marsico, and Jaan
Valsiner.
About the Editors.
About the Contributors.
Marķa Elisa Molina, Universidad del Desarrollo,
Carlos Cornejo, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Giuseppina Marsico, University of Salerno
Jaan Valsiner, Aalborg University
