Scotto di Vettimo, Delphine <br/><br/>
Auto­biographical Writing: a Plea for Intimacy 

 -  2016.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> Based on the history of Marta—a family history of persecution, exile, and shame—this study gives priority to clinical experience as an experience of intimacy, within the context of psychotherapeutically-oriented interviews. Intimacy is understood here as a personal envelope which, on the one hand, is formed in the intersubjective relationship, in a relationship that necessarily consists of opaqueness and alterity, and, on the other, which confronts the subject with him- or herself and with others, ensuring both a social function and a psychic function. In counterpoint, a reflection is offered on the conditions of unveiling and veiling of intimacy in transferential space, of which shame, which entails a laying bare of the subject, represents one of the dialectics. The clinical setting provides a perfect opportunity for bringing to light the structural elements of a process which is traumatic in nature, and in which the subject can experience this ordeal of strangeness and of secret at the deepest levels of him- or herself, an experience which can lead to metaphorical invention.