EXTIMACY
Jacques Lacan coins the term extimite by applying the prefix
ex (from exterieur,) to the French word intimite
(intimacy). The resulting neologism, "extimacy," neatly expresses the way
in which psychoanalysis problematizes the opposition between inside and
outside, between container and contained. The real is just as much inside
as outside, and the unconscious is not a purely interior psychic system
but an intersubjective structure ("the unconscious is outside"), Again,
the Other "is something strange to me, although it is at the heart of
me." The center of the subject is outside: the subject is ex-centric.
The structure of extimacy is perfectly expressed in the topology of the
torus and moebius strip.
- Dylan Evans, AN INTRODUCTORY DICTIONARY OF LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS
(New York, 1996).
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