Clinical psychoanalysis serves as our best laboratory for exploring the riddle of what it is to be a person, and how a person is at once singularly unique while always a piece of the interpersonal fabric of humanity. In Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis, Warren Poland casts a freshly erudite eye on this paradox, resisting individual or intersubjective bias and avoiding the parochial allegiances common in our age of pluralism.

Poland combines vivid reports from clinical analyses, literary readings, and his own life – all unfolding original observations on a person as both a part of and apart from human commonality. His consideration of how one person’s witnessing facilitates another’s self-definition, a concept extended here in his study of outsiderness as part of human nature, has been marked a keynote contribution. Clinical illustrations of moments that matter but are usually omitted from public presentation are set alongside examples of reading powerful fiction to show how analyst and author both incite fresh openness in a person’s mind. Poland goes farther, exposing the personal power of union and separateness in its keenest form, facing the ultimate separation of one’s own actual death.

Only with separateness can true intimacy grow, and only within the fabric of others can true individuality exist. This evocative book, ranging from the lightness of whimsy to the dread of dying, allows every reader to taste of and learn from Poland’s thinking. Psychoanalyst or patient, writer or reader, each one living one’s own life – all can find new understandings in this work.