On The Sense of Loneliness

Exploring the feeling of loneliness. Possible causes and effects.

INTRODUCTION

“It has been common for people to speak of searching for their own identity… They have found themselves transplanted or uprooted or unsettled, uncertain where they belong or whether they… can attach themselves anywhere, or whether they are unwanted or necessary, or can look forward with any hope or confidence at all.” (Plomer, 1975, 11). Indeed at least since Plato’s the Republic (c. 375 BC), that paradox has been debated that homo sapiens �" those individual yet social beings �" have lived in turbulent world in which there are few signs that individuals will ever be able to safely survive in a crowded world which grows ever more denser, wilder and more willfully self-destructive.

Melanie Klein, one of the “most innovative among the theorists of the 1920’s” (Gay, 1989, 467), when she died in 1960 left her paper “On the Sense of Loneliness” (Klein, 1963) which she claimed gave new and uncomfortable insights into the human condition. Her concern was about the readiness with which individuals and societies retreat from their problems into the defense of feeling alone as a way of escaping from fancied threats and “scary” situations. Bettelheim, when interviewing a severely autistic girl asked her: “Don’t you feel better when you talk about what’s scary?” but she retorted: “More scary.” (Bettelheim, 1967, 200). The feeling of loneliness is for Klein far more than not having a companionship, but is “a yearning for an unobtainable perfect internal state” (Klein, 1963, 300), the roots of which the individual or groups usually unconscious, through sometimes maybe dimly aware.

Fromm, without rejecting Freud’s psychological insights has more socio-cultural appreciation of loneliness than Melanie Klein’s focus on the pre-verbal stage of emotional development. For Fromm “The fear of isolation is powerful [that people] cannot live without some sort of cooperation with others if [they] want to survive… The possibility of being left alone is necessarily the most serious threat to the child’s whole existence” (Fromm, 2003, 16), and how the growing child, the adolescent and ultimately the adult deals with that threat will determine the success or failure of living. Even more “compelling [is] the fact of the subjective self-consciousness, of the faculty of thinking by which man is aware of himself as an individual entity, different from nature and other people” (Ibid, 16-17). Indeed the lonely are lonely because they have so little freedom to develop, “the integrity of [the] individual self” (Ibid, 18). The fear of freedom, the running away from freedom annihilates their humanity.

Fromm and Klein alike, despite their contrasting views, seem to us to lessen the emotional development of feelings and fantasies that govern our personal experiences and denial of them. A poet says it well: “however sagacious or eminent, no one can urge us out of our personal experiences…” Shall we go about to prove what we already know, that we are alive and are aware of the surrounding elements and entities [and people and their ideas]… to enjoy and grieve over our condition?” (Dixon, 1942, 73). A rather too defeatist position.

Life is like a grotesque novel, a “complex fabric of recurrences, characters, scenes and metaphors [that] return in proliferating resemblances. Each character serves as an emblem of similar [or contrasting] characters… Think, for example, how many orphans and neglected children are in Bleak House and how many bad parents [for example, the Lord Chancellor].” (Miller, 1985, 15). Individual characters who live without a reassuring world often become individuals with a grudging sense of loneliness, isolation and emptiness that nay be created within or from society without the individual’s awareness.

Recently LB’s adopted African son touchingly summed up his life as a child. He has to resist the physical and emotional violence of the demeaning laws and social conditions of apartheid. He said to LB “I want to run away from myself… When I was a kid I always wanted to be white.” He continued with a grimace and asked rhetorically: “Well wouldn’t you want to be white if you were me?” He had to forge his own world from his fellows, and was cut off from his society, from feeling a part of it. Loneliness for the many Africans was imposed on them by racism and one of the tasks of building a new South Africa has been to recreate Africans so that they/we may feel free to create an individuality.

Too few clinical papers or case historians explore how emotional problems often originate, persist or are worsened by the clumsy fit between the individuals’ efforts to live without feelings of loneliness or being overwhelmed by external compulsions and social political and economic pressures.

Fenichel, who was both a Marxist and a psychoanalyst was not alone in observing that “neuroses are the outcome of unfavorable and socially determined educational measures corresponding to a given and historically developed milieu… they cannot change without corresponding changes in the milieu.” (Fenichel, 1982, 586).

The milieu changes “if for some reason [rooted in the unconscious…] the human mind is… seeking what it conceives to be the center of things; sometimes one may call it reality, again truth, generated when individuals are somehow set free to be and feel that their individual, private selves, And if one’s life is unfree to search for a centre by an authoritarian Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa or Right-wing authoritarian Islam, it is probably hopeless to seek a cure. Winnicott’s True self, as distinct from the false self, depends on the cultures” devotion to freedom, personal growth and fulfillment. (Winnicott, 2002).

SOCIETY, CULTURE AND THE SENSE OF LONELINESS

Some soi-disant psychotherapists have attempted “the shifting of the emphasis from actuality to childhood… [which] may mean the further repression of, or illusions about present worries” (Fenichel, 1982, 565). It may mean a superficial clinging on to the sense if loneliness as an integral part of the false self. The world can be blamed!

Kleinians may be correct to focus on babies’ feelings of insecurity and aloneness but it is doubtful how much a baby can understand and feel the complexity of the world of relationships and their insecurities. A major cause of the feeling of loneliness is a direct result of humanity’s “alienation from himself and his fellow men which is prevalent in modern man” (Fromm, 2004, 164) �" an alienation that is not peculiar to modern urban busyness. An African friend has urban with rural life: “the loneliness in the township is quite rarer than in urban areas. Township people share almost everything, to conversation and food and always, in cultural ways they are always together.”

Childhood lasts a long time, and during it the baby and child have to cope with the comings and goings of people and situations that are unknown, fearful and bewildering. The very traumatic act of birth plunges an infant into a dangerous world in which it has to learn how to survive and trust its carers. Melanie Klein’s last paper, “On the Sense of Loneliness” oscillates between understanding how the world of reality may be only partly responsible for the sentiment of feeling alone. For example, Kitso, a gregarious man with many friends has felt alone and has organized about how to deal with his feelings of aloneness. Klein believed that such a feeling alone is an aspect of an emotional illness, partly depressive and partly schizophrenic. She went further to examine two interacting fears; (1) The fear of being alone and (2) the fear of parting. Going back to early infancy, Klein observed that, even in the first half of the year of life, a baby a baby may have feelings of depression when parting, because it feels it may unconsciously destroy the mother, who has been good, loving with non-loving parts. Saying goodbye and feeling it weakens the self: “Why did I let mother go? Why did mother let me go?” There is anyway nothing in life to make up for lost love. Mother’s coming and going, responding and ignoring creates a disturbed interest in people that can never be fully satisfied and leaves a never compensated-for feeling of insecurity. A feeling that has been expressed by some of my clients over deceased loved ones and past lovers. An important part of growing up is therefore the development of a liveable development of trust. And a successful internalization of the good object [a satisfying loving mother] is the root of an identification with it which may strengthen the feeling of goodness and trust…

“Many of Virginia Woolf’s novels are closely concerned with the conflicting forces of isolation and communication. Under the guise of privacy and room of one’s own, isolation can be a positive thing, but it also implies solitude” (Whitworth, 2009, 182), Melanie Klein’s analysis of loneliness took Woolf’s concern further as a universal element of being a baby.

Consider for instance Woolf’s treatment of the lonely, unhappy Doris Kilman who complained enviously “that… people don’t ask me to parties” and she knew as she said it that it was this egotism that was her undoing. “She had suffered so horribly ‘Why should they ask me?’ She said. ‘I’m plain, I’m unhappy.’ She knew it was idiotic. But it was all those people passing �" people with parcels who despised her who made her say it. …’I don’t pity myself.’ She said. ‘I pity… other people much more’ … Was Miss Kilman going to say anything more? ‘Don’t quite forget me’ said Doris Kilman; her voice quivered. Right away to the end of the field the dumb creature galloped in terror…” (Woolf, 200, 129). “I never go to parties.” Complained Miss Kilman, and felt mortified when left alone by Mrs Dalloway’s daughter.

What is noticeable about Miss Kilman is her ambivalence about herself. She recognizes her solitude, blames herself, not her family or childhood, longs desperately to belong somewhere, to someone, even to the reluctant Elizabeth Dalloway. She feels lonely and is acutely unhappy and angry because she is ware of the lovely world of the busy passer’s by with their parcels, for other people or from them to whom they belong. Why does she pity others? We don’t really know and it is expected that neither does she. Does she really want to know why she is observing “them”? Whom in her childhood did she feel she belonged to? Anyone? Was Doris Kilman “mad” or was she fighting unsuccessfully against “distortions forced upon women by their society?” (Gordon, 1986, 55). Have men had to fight against similar distortions and loneliness?

Similarly writing about her mother, Jean Rhys, was moved by her mother’s withdrawal from her family: “Behind her silence she looked lonely, a stranger in a strange house… She was sitting gazing out the window. But how could she be lonely when she was never alone? All the same she looked lonely, patient and resigned. Also obstinate…”  (Rhys, 1979, 45).

CONCLUSION

The education of psychotherapists should therefore consider three (3) additional routes into learning. Firstly it should never be forgotten that Fried who was much concerned with developing theories and exploring the inner needs of his patients, he never forgot that he was concerned with a real person with real personal problems in society. Secondly therefore a novel problem exists in Africa: where there are many cultural disparities that are barely touched upon by conventional psychotherapists. Thirdly, a psychotherapist has to intuitively unearth the real individual who is concealed by his/her language and by what society insists upon doing to him/her. On the other hand Klein insists that, it must never be forgotten that adults began mysteriously as a baby who will probably develop along personal lines regardless of his or her society.

Loneliness is often imposed directly by culture and is a theme often recognized in literature, and trainee psychotherapists would do well to read, for example, the writings of Alan Paton and Doris Lessing. The loneliness of “western societies” is very different from that of post-colonial Arica, where political, social and economic change offers little security.

Author's Note

Ignore grammar. Feel free to comment. Its pretty much nonsensical but I believe its leading to something. Terrible idea to have used so many references. Would have loved to find some African articles on loneliness to use.