Intimate Relations

In their previous book, "The Way Men Think", Liam Hudson and Bernadine Jacot explored the dislocation experienced by all male children as they separate from their mothers and identify with their fathers. This book focuses on the experience of women and the way they relate to men. As they grow up, small girls are not "wounded" like their brothers, but nonetheless acquire a burden (or "incubus") that distorts their perception of intimacy. For reasons intrinsic to their development, the book argues, women will find all heterosexual relationships troubling. Examining the differences between the minds of men and women, the authors describe the incompatibilities upon which intimacies between the sexes seem so often to founder. They argue that the dissimilarities between men and women are not an obstacle to real intimacy, but its prior condition: intimacy is energising precisely because it joins like to unlike. It is its ambiguity which makes erotic closeness enduringly compelling. Intimate relationships should - like works of art - be understood as exercises of the imagination.
This work offers detailed accounts of the lives of remarkable women - Vera Britain, Kate Millett, Margaret Thatcher and Margaret Mead - showing how the thoughts and feelings of the two sexes are subtly but systematically off-set from one another. It analyzes the resonances between the public and the private in particular works of art, and uses literary texts - from Truman Capote and Doris Lessing to John Milton - to establish a theoretical framework within which the phenomena of intimacy can be considered and men and women begin to understand the lives they share.