People seek intensity. In relationships, in experiences, in therapy itself — there is a pull towards the overwhelming, the dramatic, the all-consuming. Intensity feels like aliveness. It feels like proof that something real is happening.
Philippe Jacquet’s clinical observation, built over decades of practice, is the opposite: intensity is the best enemy of intimacy. The more intense the feeling, the less likely it is that you are actually seeing the person in front of you.
The anger scale
Consider anger. Imagine a scale from zero to ten.
If you are angry at five out of ten — genuinely irritated by something Philippe said — that anger is about him. It is present-tense. It belongs to this room, this moment. The anger and the person are connected.
If you are angry at ten out of ten, something different is happening. That level of intensity has almost nothing to do with Philippe, with what he said, or with what occurred. What has happened is that something he did or said became the final container for a lifetime of feeling — feeling disrespected, dismissed, unseen. Every previous experience of that feeling, accumulated over years, is now concentrated in this moment. Philippe has become a symbol. He is no longer a person being responded to.
At ten out of ten, you are not angry at Philippe. You are angry at your history.
The rhythm of nature
Intensity — earthquakes, tornadoes, twisters — is almost always about devastation. These are the forces that destroy, that level, that leave nothing standing.
A forest does not grow through earthquakes. A garden does not flower through storms. What produces growth is patience, consistency, and the slow accumulation of conditions that allow life to develop over time.
Human beings are part of nature. The same rhythm applies. Every time something feels overwhelmingly intense, it is worth asking: am I growing, or am I in the middle of a storm?
Falling in love
Falling in love is intensely pleasurable. It is also, in an important clinical sense, a state in which you are not yet seeing the other person. What you are seeing is a projection — the ideal partner, the person who seems to fill what is missing. The intensity of that early experience is, in large part, the intensity of your own need reflected back at you.
The real encounter comes later. It comes when the intensity settles and what remains is a real person — with their limitations, their contradictions, their inability to fill the hole that was never theirs to fill. That hole is yours. It has always been yours. No person can close it from the outside.
Real love — as distinct from the intensity of falling — is what happens next. It is the decision to stay with the person you now actually see. Not the projection. Not the ideal. The person. To choose them, clearly, with open eyes.
That is intimacy. It is quieter than intensity. It is also, by some distance, more real.
“When you are angry at ten out of ten with someone, it has almost nothing to do with them. They have become a symbol — the last container of everything you have felt all your life. And when you fall in love at ten out of ten, you are not yet meeting the real person. You are meeting your need. Real love comes when you see who is actually there — and decide to stay.” — Philippe Jacquet
Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet — psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, London.