Autonomy and Intimacy
Only in our culture, do we have the potential to choose how to live our lives, how much autonomy, how much intimacy, and with whom. In other cultures both men and women have predestined roles which are more rigidly defined.
The greater freedom in our culture allows a greater role in determining our choices. Studying and understanding individual psychology can help us decipher the complex factors which lead people to feel that these two states of being, autonomy and intimacy, are compatible, or, a mixture of them.
All of our lives we all try to achieve a balance between our wish for connections with other people and our wish to be independent beings, making autonomous choices.
Psychonalysts have studied the conflicts we experience trying to balance our desires for intimacy with another person and our independent personal fulfillment.
We develop the capacity to deal appropriately with aggressive feelings that normally occur, the result of life's inevitable frustrations. We would not mature and develop if we lived in a frustration-free environment.
Early in life, some parents may have difficulties dealing with a child's wishes for doing things on his or her own and may attribute aggressive motivations to their toddlers. The end result may be a child who becomes overly aggressive or the opposite, overly-inhibited, unable to achieve his or her drive for autonomy.
If an adolescent is terrified by his parents closeness, they may constantly want to get away from them. If the adolescent is afraid of being independent and all that it means, they may become overly-close and overly-dependent on their parents.
All of us have a mixture of the desires, to be autonomous, to be connected, to achieve pleasure, and to, unconsciously, hurt those who interfere with the achievement of various goals. Finding a compromise among a multitude of feelings and fantasies is a difficult task for all. The ideal aim, of course, is to find a compromise solution that works for each of us as individuals. Each of us has to find the balance between autonomy and intimacy that works for us in as adaptive a way as possible.
in Beyond Freud
Psychology Today
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