Intimate Terrorism

It is almost impossible in our time to think about love, sex, intimacy, and marriage without thinking about power. With our rampant divorce rate and heightened awareness of abuse in all its forms, the phrase "the war between the sexes" has never sounded more menacingly accurate. In Intimate Terrorism therapist and writer Michael Vincent Miller explores this crisis of intimacy in American life with the eye of a clinician and the eloquence of a poet. He demonstrates how our cultural myths about romance are arrested in adolescence, and how the inevitable disappointments result in bitter struggles between men and women, fueled by anxiety and resentment, that he terms "intimate terrorism." In his view, when romance, like politics, fails, what remains is the desire not to change or persuade one's partner, but to demoralize him or her, to gain the upper hand. The bonds of love have become so intertwined with this quest for power that we have created what Miller calls "the culture of abuse"—reflecting not only an increase in actual abuse but also an overcompensating need to imagine abuse in almost any intimate encounter. Miller moves effortlessly from such headline-making events as the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow fracas and the O.J. Simpson case to examples from his own practice of the kinds of battles being waged between unhappy couples in homes and bedrooms across the country. He draws as well from literature, psychological theory, and popular culture to help us understand the continuum between our private woes and our public lives. Intimate Terrorism is an urgent, important, and superbly written work of cultural criticism. It is one of the most probing readings of the American psyche in years—one that will contain numerous shocks of recognition for every man or woman who reads it. Certain to be controversial and widely discussed, it is a book that reaches out to anyone who wonders why love in the modern age has become so perilous an undertaking.