Intimate Spaces of Mental Wellness

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.