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Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies, by Lynn Jamieson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. 209 pp. NPL cloth. ISBN: 07456-1573-2.
In contemporary personal relationships, how important is intimacy-defined as self-disclosure and mutual understanding in an equal relationship? Have personal relationships changed significantly to become more intimate over this century? Intimacy focuses on these two broad questions, in separate chapters on family, parenting, friendship, sex, and couples. Lynn Jamieson questions the view, advanced by Anthony Giddens and others, that intimacy has become "the centre of meaningful personal life in contemporary societies" (p. 1). She challenges the argument that personal relationships have shifted toward "disclosing intimacy" or "pure relationships" devoid of practical concerns and unequal power.
To make her case, Jamieson reviews empirical sociological research and social commentary on personal relationships in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand in the twentieth century, primarily British studies. She concludes that disclosing intimacy has become much more pervasive in...