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PhD. Topics

Institute for Research in Social Communication SAS

Topic
Extimacy within healthy intimacy development
PhD. program
Health psychology
Name of the supervisor
doc. PhDr. Gabriel Bianchi, CSc.
Contact:
Receiving school
Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences
Annotation
The research project aims to explore the place and processes of extimation in the development of the subject's intimacy, in the context of its transformation and transmutation, as well as the general sexualization of public space.
Context:
The exposure of intimacy and sexuality can be seen as a reflection of a rather strong attack on sexual norms in particular. The transgression of norms is often consensual, and thus a change or shift in social norms (determining sexual subjectivity) rather than just sporadic violations of sexual norms in the media. This statement resonates with the thesis on the need for intimate citizenship (Plummer, 2003), also with the call to understand the transmutation of intimacy (cf. Bianchi, 2010, 2020). However, it also points to the need for a broader discussion of what it means for a subject to be both intimate and public, as Georges Teyssot has recently pointed out (cf. Teyssot, 2010) in the context of the media. Teyssot develops the intimacy-extimation dualism originally proposed and developed by Jacques Lacan (Lacan, 1969, p. 179). Teyssot offers insight into the historical development of the division and later the convergence and fusion of the private and the public, which has resulted in their current apparent fusion through the Internet, where all media are present, and especially through social networking sites. Lacan's dialectic of intimacy and extimation has also been used in a modified way by Serge Tisseron (2002, 2011), who highlights two facts that are relevant to the discussion of media and intimacy: (1) the content of intimacy is not necessarily fully accessible even to the subject; the media can thus "feed" us an intimate topic and replace the content we do not know [in our subjectivity] with banal phrases. And (2) there is a subject's "controlled" opening up and testing of his/her intimate contents through a process of extimation - opening up and offering to other eyes or to the public, that is, a kind of "affirming/testing of the intimate through the 'other. 'The desire for extimation is inseparable from the desire to encounter and risk with the other."(Tisseron, 2011)
Objective:
The aim of this dissertation is to explore the diverse constellations of subjective testing of intimacy through extimation, analyzing the risk, social skills and authentication of the subject in doing so; and the alternation of extimation towards different addressees and social environments. Identifying extimation as an indicator of the subject's psychological maturity - willingness to take risks and ability to cope with risk while gaining support/affirmation of our intimate 'world'.
Method:
A primarily qualitative approach is assumed, a narrative-phenomenological.