Recently, I wrote to a friend who lives in New York. We're going to stay at his place in Manhattan when we visit there at the end of July. We intend to see Billy Elliot and just "chill" in the big city. I don't think we will actually find anything very chilly in New York in July, but part of what we want to experience is simply the pleasure of the company of our friend.

Friends speak a different language with one another. They have such a commonality that it produces a shorthand expression. For instance, recently I wrote to my friend: "I am wondering what his take might be on the 'new' phenomenology, which is largely French in origin (Levinas, Jean Luc Marion, Dominique Janicaud, Michel Henry, and Jean-Louis Chretien). Through my reading of Smith's synthesis of these people, I understand that the phenomenological reduction is a violence against the 'other'. Smith's understanding of the solution is in Marion's "saturated phenomenon" and incarnational logic (which to me must suggest Merleau-Ponty's lived body). These things essentially assert that the other is "unforgettable" because of the power of the other's transcendence and that they overwhelm in their presentation, their gifting. Thus, to me, and where I think this is all leading, is to the acceptance of the being of the other as given in the natural attitude. I could be wrong on that last part, but I really don't see how any kind of reduction is possible. Even having a phenomenological horizon seems limiting the other to what the same (self) imagines is possible."

He wrote back and said: "YES!!! That is precisely where I am going. It is a blind spot in Heidegger, although he begins a serious revision of intentionality that does not separate subject from object. Heidegger took root in France more than anywhere else. The Germans rejected him-for obvious reasons. B and T wasn't translated into English until 1962. Levinas complained that Heidegger's Dasein stood shoulder to shoulder with the other (Dasein, I suppose). Levinas's beings stood face to face!"

I came back to that a few days later, when the conversation had grown cold, and I was rather amazed. It sounds like esoteric code. Terms are not defined; they are just used in rapid succession.

I believe it is not just what we were saying that drove us to write to one another like that. We were talking philosophy with a view to its implications for meetings that take place between people, such as the relationship that builds between therapist and client during psychotherapy. That is important, but it wasn't that which brought out the exclamation points in our exchange. It was the connection and the recognition that we were thinking down the same lines. It was the mind candy of thinking, but it was also seeing the thinker thinking back at you.

The lexical and syntactical shorthand that mediates connecting between friends is not just a means of sharing information more efficiently. It is the discourse of relationship. It is affirming one's affinity. The words themselves tell on the people expressing them, and they say "We do not need to explain ourselves, because we already know what we mean by what we say".

You know what I mean by this (question mark)" and "You know what I mean by this (period)" are two different expressions.

It's this kind of relational shorthand that is exactly what breaks down between partners in an intimate relationship, and I see it every week, if not every day, in my practice. When a couple comes to see me, it's either because they never developed the ability to hear, read, and understand one another, or they have somehow lost it. If from the beginning their relationship was birthed in the sexual attraction and excitement of meeting in clubs, and if they went almost immediately into playing house with one another, then perhaps they never really spent enough time talking, observing one another in various contexts and really learning one another's shorthand. If the demands of life with career and babies have stolen their time to look into one another's eyes and reconnect, then one day they realise they feel alone with no one who understands them. Or worse, they find someone else to start the process all over again.

A great deal of my work when I work as a marriage therapist is about helping people learn, or re-learn, their relational shorthand-their real intimacy.

In that respect, I will recommend a book now. Centering and the Art of Intimacy Handbook: A New Psychology of Close Relationships (1993 Simon and Schuster) by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks is not a new book. So the new psychology may not be chronologically new, but it might be new to any given reader who comes across it. This book can be found at Amazon.com but it is available through subsidiary sellers.

The Hendricks are recognised experts on relationship, and they have several helpful books out. Another that people might want to read is Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment (1992 Bantam), which is available new from Amazon.com. When you see raves from a psychologist like John Bradshaw (known for his work on the subject of shame) and a recording artist like Bonnie Raitt (known for her slide guitar and raspy-bluesy voice) you know something is right.

Okay, so now back to the philosophy and shorthand with my friend in New York. Perhaps he and his partner will go out with my wife and me, and we'll all sit around talking gestalt therapy and French phenomenology… or maybe just the Statue of Liberty and Ground Zero…or maybe Billy Elliot. Who knows? Something will happen.