Romantic Intimacy

How much can we know about what other people are feeling and how much can we sympathize or empathize with them? The term "intimacy"--which has always referred both to the inmost and personal, and to relationships of exceptional closeness--captures a tension between a confidence in the possibility of shared experience and a competing belief that thoughts and feelings are irreducibly private. This book is an interdisciplinary study of shared feeling as imagined in eighteenth-century ethics, romantic literature, and twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Original interpretations of Hume, Rousseau,…