an extremely intimate one Does "an extremely intimate one" at the end of the following text mean "an extremely intimate distance"? Extract: In this I shall be departing somewhat from Freud, for whom the pleasurable pain of primary masochism is outweighed by the danger it holds for the psyche of internal destruction. The gist of my argument will be that the artist, rather than taking him- or herself as an object to be destroyed, finds a surrogate ‘object’ to channel the potentially dangerous defusion of the instincts involved in primary masochism so that the fragmentation they incur is experienced at a distance, although, paradoxically, an extremely intimate one.