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Intimate Spaces of Mental Wellness
- Rhetoric, Politics & Culture
- Michigan State University Press
- Volume 1, Issue 1, Summer 2021
- pp. 55-66
- 10.1353/rhp.2021.0005
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
This forum piece offers the concept of intimate spaces of mental wellness as an alternative to top-down psychoanalytic theorizing, starting from ground-up communities of practice that cultivate knowledge and shared vulnerability to relieve anguish. It proposes a de-linking of psychoanalytic theory rooted in the belief that psychoanalysis is still a helpful theory-of-practice and that shared spaces of truth-telling and intimacy are essential to cultivating community and healthy attachments. Transformed, psychoanalysis—or better, psychoanalyses— forecast how popular and poststructural theories of rhetoric might yet be de-linked from their repressive epistemic foundations.