The Intimate Enemy

by Dr. George R. Bach, Peter Wyden

Our copy has the same cover as stock photo shown. Name and initial on first page. Minor browning on edge of pages. Minor creasing and two punch holes in corners of covers. Discoloration on covers and spine.

Genres: Marriage, Relationships, Psychology, Nonfiction, Self Help, Communication

384 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

Reviews

[Sunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was exceptionally insightful and piercingly honest. One of the key lessons of this book is that you should welcome fights and confrontations. As Lao tzu once said : the sage experiences no difficulties because he always confronts them. There are some really interesting chapters about why intimates fight? Training lovers to be fighters. How to fight fair. Communication fights. Emails fighting. Sex as a fighting word. Fights over children and family fights to name a few. Here are some of the best bits:

- "Untrained couples can't get off these depressing merry go rounds because they subscribe to the notion that you can't change people. This defeatist attitude couldn't be more unfortunate. It inhibits the enterprise and imagination that partners need to come up with for new solutions."
- "The best way to get constructive results from intimate hostilities is to fight by appointment only. The more calmly and deliberately an aggressor can organise his thoughts before an engagement the more likely it is that his arguments will be persuasive. And the fight will confine itself to one issue instead of ricocheting all over the intimate landscape. "
- "Society's judgement does not help people understand why many perfectly skilled partners occasionally blow their cool and turn to violence."
- "They rarely realise that intimate communication is an art that requires considerable imagination and creativity. They are almost never aware that only a conscious resolute decision on the part of both partners to work at a problem continually and for the rest of their lives can produce good communications."
- "The very absence of major fight issues makes intimates pick fights. They may bicker to upset the marital apple cart just to be sure there are no rotten apples in the load."
- "Clean constructive parental fighting with spontaneous encounter that is ultimately resolved by making up is something else altogether. Witnessing a fair fight teaches children the facts of life about aggression and conflict resolution."
- "The thirty years that separate the generations often render the old experience largely irrelevant to the conditions that face young people. Consequently the transfer of learning of skills of wisdoms and all the gifts that shape a realistic bond between generations no longer yield the comforting useful old results."
- "Some times an outsider that comes to an encounter with a young person without the encumbrances of past misunderstandings is in the best position to show that this is an exciting world but that it is moving fast and that older people do have something to teach youngsters: how to live and grow."
- Many parents still fail to realise that youngsters need limits as urgently as a ship needs a captains decision. When parents fail to volunteer limits children find ways to ask for them . Often even the smallest children force parents to set limits for aggressive behaviours. They do this by misbehaving and thereby goading mothers and fathers to set limits."
- "The system is most likely to fail because it is easily misunderstood especially because intimacy and aggression like love and hate are conventions believed to be mutually exclusive."
- "Intimacy within a family is the most effective way of raising psychologically Healthy new generations is society's best insurance against raising one alienated generation after another."
- "Chronic redundant insult exchanges are hostility rituals which in cases of the inability to fight out frustrations are the only and perhaps necessary aggression catharsis available to couples who neither know how to fight fair nor foul. Yet they must somehow express their disappointment anger and frustration with their life in a togetherness they do not want to destroy. So they either lash out ritualistically at their children the symbol of their unhappiness together or at each other. In many such cases participation in a hostility ritual is the only experience in mutual intimacy the couple can afford."
- "Camouflaged hostility is most prevalent in cultures such as ours that decry open interpersonal face to face aggressive levelling - especially among loved ones as bad, nasty, ugly, etc. In America both north and south the practise of camouflaged aggression (the fine art of doing your friend in and getting away with it, oneupmanship etc) is a social pastime played for big psychological payoffs."

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

In real life, we can't expect "a custom fit in an off-the-rack world," as Hawkeye Pierce told Margaret in a 1979 episode of M*A*S*H. What this means is that, when we get close to someone--anyone--then there are going to be points of conflict and contention.

Bach's book launches from this Fact of Life: that arguments are inevitable in relationships (pp. 17-33), so what we must do is take care to ensure that these arguments don't become toxic and poison intimacy. Rather than trying to avoid all conflict (which has toxic effects, as well), Bach's book sketches a middle ground: If We Have to Fight, Let Us Learn to Fight Fairly! In fact, in what might seem to be a paradox, arguments--"fair fighting"--can actually be bridges to intimacy, since they provide a stage for couples to canvass, compare and contrast their deepest desires and most personal aspirations. Toward that end, Bach offers specific guidance on "How to Fight a Fair Fight."

By way of background, a couple of notes are in order: (1) Bach's understanding of aggression's psychology owes a lot to Konrad Lorenz's 1966 book "On Aggression." (2) Bach shares Eric Berne's view (in his "Games People Play" (1964)) that some people avoid the vulnerability of intimacy through playing "games"--i.e., playing (masked) roles in patterned rituals which are comfortably predictable, but at the price of robbing their "players" of real self-revelation and mutual intimacy. (One famous dramatic example of this, which is never far from Bach's thoughts, is Edward Albee's drama, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1962).) Readers of Bach's book might find a pre-reading of these three sources helpful to appreciating Bach's diagnosis of intimacy-failures in relationships, and the "fair fighting" prescription he offers for remedying the problem.

[Whoisabishag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part Of A Must Read Trilogy, in this "Age Of MicroAggression"! SEE: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...

[Steph Clayton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is the quintessential 1960's marriage book. The examples they use are almost like reading stereotypes of mid-century couples, but notwithstanding that, there are little nuggets of good advice. If you're willing to read through some old psychology to pick them out, then this isn't a bad book for married couples at all.

[Heather Derussy · Rating 5 out of 5]

While somewhat dated, much of the relationship books I've read have drawn from this book.

[Rick Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot from this book and over the years have recommended it to many couples. It would benefit from being condensed.

[Keith]

This approach does not work per The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples page 14 of 480. It then refers to a “terrific book” that corrects this error: Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion.

[k. sirek]

mentioned in Ethical Slut (Hardy & Easton, 2017) “Published in 1968, the book is terribly outdated, but the material on communication and detailed descriptions of constructive ways to share your anger with a partner are priceless,” (160).

[Akhil Jain]

Reco by VIkas Divyakirti