In psychoanalytic theory, especially Lacanian theory, the innermost core or kernel of the self that is paradoxically the most external and unreachable part of identity.
From Latin 'extimus' (outermost, external) reversed to create a neologism in Lacanian psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan in the 1970s-80s. It combines 'ex-' (out) with 'intima' (innermost).
Lacan's 'extima' is mind-bending: it's the idea that your truest self is simultaneously the most foreign thing to yourself—like how your own face is the one face you can never see without a mirror!
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