The Psychoanalyst's View Of Loneliness

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

What is loneliness, where does it come from? Probably, each of us at least once in his life asked himself this question.

Loneliness is a feeling. Like all other feelings, it depends on our perception of a life situation.

If we look at the feeling of loneliness from a formal point of view, then it should arise when we are in isolation, i.e. alone. But this is far from the case. Every day we are surrounded by hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people, we go to work, to shops, ride the subway, communicate with colleagues, but, nevertheless, this does not prevent a person from feeling lonely. Of course, in the process of everyday running and fuss, we forget about it, no matter how we feel it, just as we do not experience, or rather we are not aware of any other feelings.

It's like a joke. Do you see a gopher? - No! - And he is!

As a rule, the feeling of loneliness is exacerbated on weekends and holidays, when the hustle and bustle called "SHOULD" stops and we can be left to ourselves and our desires. This is the so-called weekend syndrome. To cope with this, many go to clubs, go to visit, play computer games, drink alcohol, and all this with the sole purpose of killing free time and not feeling lonely.

Although on the other hand in life there are moments or periods when we are physically alone, but we feel good and comfortable and we do not have loneliness. Here it is important to ask the question of what we are thinking, where our thoughts are directed and with whom we are in the soul at this moment. Our brain produces thoughts 24 hours a day, but only 1 / 10th of them we are aware and notice, the rest flash in our head so quickly that we do not have time to grasp them and realize. But it is these thoughts that for the most part determine our mood, feelings and emotional state. These are the so-called unconscious thoughts. For example, we may feel sad and longing that something is not going well with our spouse or sexual partner.

This can be accompanied by a keen sense of loneliness. But if we can look into our unconscious, for example, through the analysis of dreams, cleansing or reservations, we may be surprised to find that completely different thoughts and associations slip through our unconscious. For example, memories of early childhood, where we felt lonely when our parents fought or were busy with work and did not provide emotional warmth. As a rule, these are rather painful experiences, so they are repressed into the unconscious, and then projected onto actual life situations. When this happens, we may notice that the same situations are repeated in different aspects of our life. For example, we find ourselves disappointed or abandoned, or we ourselves push people away from ourselves, explaining this by some external reasons and circumstances. In psychology, this explanation is called rationalization.

If we analyze current life situations, for example, at an appointment with a psychologist, then this relieves a certain tension and acuteness of the problem, but does not relieve us of an internal conflict, the roots of which lie in our unconscious. In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, these unconscious conflicts are brought to life and processed in the transference. For example, if the client was left by his mother in childhood, and he could not cope with this anxiety and felt depressed, he develops certain patterns of behavior that repeat from time to time the traumatic situation that, as a defenseless baby, he could not cope with.

In psychotherapy, when the client begins to interact with the psychotherapist, a transference is formed in which the client begins to build a relationship with the therapist as with that significant object with which there was an unresolved unconscious conflict

For example, if the client had a mother who wanted to leave him, was emotionally cold and indifferent with him, he will show coldness and detachment from the therapist, no matter how warm and emotionally accepting the therapist is, the client will still feel indifference, abandonment and rejection., sometimes unconsciously provoking the therapist to do so. The task of the psychotherapist is to create such conditions so that the client's unconscious receives a different, more positive substitute experience and there is an awareness (knowledge gained through one's own experience) that in reality, for example, in a relationship with a psychotherapist, this is different and the relationship here can be built differently, more constructively … This is a very long and painstaking work that requires a lot of skill and endurance.

Here it is important to create conditions for change, and not to explain to the client what is what. Explanation and understanding at the level of consciousness will not change anything, most people who think about life and understand it this way, and say at the reception about the following phrases: "- I understand that there is nothing to be offended here, but, the offense still arises!" I really like the aphorism of one of my colleagues: The qualification of a psychotherapist is inversely proportional to the number of interpretations (explanations, advice) given by him.

Of course, such work with re-experiencing feelings that is actualized in the transference is difficult and sometimes painful. Our unconscious perceives any changes with distrust and apprehension, and this is where resistance arises, i.e. desire to act in the usual way. For example, if a client feels that they are indifferent to him or he is used (for example, as his parents did), take offense and leave, quit therapy, take revenge on the therapist, becoming even more unhappy, how often young children act in their fantasies with their parents (here I will die and you will all regret). Although we are talking about psychotherapeutic relationships, that there is nothing personal, that there is neutrality, support and acceptance, but the feelings that arise are very real and sometimes very strong, and our consciousness is always ready to come up with a rationalization (logical explanation) of any of our emotional decisions. We can easily observe the work of consciousness on rationalization in hypnotic sessions, when, for example, a person is inspired, after hypnosis, to go on stage and open an umbrella.

A person performs a suggestion, and when they ask him why he did it, he does not say “I don’t know”. His mind comes up with an explanation. For example: it is raining outside and I decided to check my umbrella, and when asked why he needed to go on stage, he said that there were a lot of people in the hall and I could hurt them. Those. He fully explains the rationality and rationality of the action suggested to him and passes it off as his desire. This example clearly shows how we live and act under the influence of the unconscious, and how consciousness explains all this. Now let's get back to the topic of loneliness. How does it form and what happens in our unconscious when we feel lonely. In psychoanalysis, there is a theory of object relations, which Melanie Klein described in her writings.

So, for example, for an infant, the first object is the mother's breast, and then the whole mother. The quality of life and emotional status of a person depend on how the infant's emotional relationships develop in the first months of life, and perinatal psychologists say that in utero, starting from the moment of conception and the mother's emotional attitude to pregnancy, the quality of life and the emotional status of a person depend. If object relations were disturbed due to some circumstances, for example, due to the mother's postpartum depression, her emotional detachment or physical absence, and a good internal object "LOVING MOTHER" was not formed, then the person will constantly feel lonely, not find a place for himself, regardless of whether it is in public or alone. He will try to find that missing love, but he will look for it based on his unconscious ideas in the same detached and emotionally callous people, like his mother.

Not receiving what he needs, he will feel a deficit of it, and then his need begins to be unsaturated. They usually say about such people: how much do not give everything a little! This is the so-called desire to merge with another person, to absorb him, as if to absorb him inside himself and make him that “good” object that he needs. But in practice, if the other person allows himself to be swallowed up, he is destroyed and spat out, and that “good inner object” remains unrepaired. Also, as a rule, people suffering from loneliness unconsciously check how much they are loved and accepted by the people around them, and the result of such a test, as a rule, turns out to be negative, because to communicate with a person who consciously or unconsciously exposes thorns and demonstrates his unacceptable, "dark" sides, not really that and want. Often the habit of loneliness and unsuccessful attempts to restore a "good object" within oneself leads to the fact that a person begins to devalue all the people around him, and especially those who strive for him.

In this aspect, you can often hear the terms: arrogance, narcissism, egocentrism, pride….

This can manifest itself in life in different ways: outwardly, a person tries to be good and do everything for others, but in fact he does to others what he likes to do or what he wants to do for him. Those. he does not see another object (desires and needs of another person) and for example, if he likes pineapples, he goes to visit and carries pineapples with him, although perhaps those to whom he does not like them, and then he expects gratitude! But can he get gratitude in this situation? Formal - yes, but sincere no! And then he can again think that he does everything for others, and they reject him, as he had in childhood. Although, in fact, all this serves as a protection from the inner mental pain that a person once experienced in early childhood and is afraid to repeat it again in his life, avoiding any significant relationship for himself, preferring to suffer from loneliness rather than build relationships, the reverse side which may be the mental pain that an infant experiences during periods of loss of a "good object."

Melanie Klein describes these infant experiences as follows: ANXIETY, FEELING OF AN ENDLESS FALLING INTO A MISSING, DESPAIRING. How can psychotherapy help here? First, in the course of psychotherapy, the dynamics that lead a person to loneliness is manifested. Over time, it becomes clear which object relationships were broken in early childhood. But this is only a small part of the work.

The main part of the work takes place in the transference and is not directly realized by the client, but has its effect on the unconscious and leads to changes. For example, a criterion for such positive changes can be the manifestation of aggression towards the psychotherapist in a shy patient who was previously afraid to show aggression in any relationship. This indicates that the client's unconscious began to trust the therapist and to a greater extent to touch his feelings, which were isolated within the personality. From the point of view of existential psychology (I. Yalom), one of the reasons for loneliness is the isolation of the inner parts of the self, when a person erects barriers from painful experiences or from his desires. When the client gains integrity and begins to accept himself, this greatly contributes to the feeling of being comfortable with himself. Another task of psychotherapy is to create conditions for the restoration of good internal objects, on which a person could rely in difficult moments of his life and transfer new positive experiences to other new relationships.

To make this clear, you can give an example: when we had a good relationship with a person close to us and he supported us during his lifetime, then when he dies, in difficult life situations we can think about him. About what he would say, how he would act, and it becomes easier for us, because he exists as an internal object. In general, from the point of view of modern psychoanalysis, a positive image of both parents is important for mental health and emotional well-being of a person. Those. For us, actual reality is not so important as our inner, unconscious ideas.

The key word here is unconscious: because if, for example, a man says that he loves and respects his mother very much, and he had a wonderful childhood, but in life he humiliates women and divorces his third wife, then this is just self-deception or speaking in psychological terms - rationalization.

There is another danger in the theme of loneliness (it is not for nothing that modern psychologists call loneliness the plague of the 21st century).

Loneliness is inherited! In raising children, we can only pass on to them what we have. What we don’t have, we cannot give.

If parents have impaired object relations, then they do not see and do not feel the real needs of their child. So, for example, when a child is capricious and demands a chocolate bar, they cannot feel that he lacks love and warmth, so to speak, the sweetness of life from the fact that he is loved and accepted. As a rule, parents who have not received the warmth themselves begin to replace love with overprotection and anxiety for the child, and react to whims with irritation, because feel helpless and unable to give what the child asks of them. Now there are many courses that talk about the theory of education, how to educate correctly. But seeing this kind of suggestion that sounds very tempting, I wonder if a formal approach, such as a formal hug, can calm the child in his soul and give him a sense of need and support, and not stop his whims at the level of behavior. I think everyone will be able to answer this question for himself, as it will be convenient for him.

As the famous American psychoanalyst Donald Woods wrote, Winnicott. No one except a mother can know better how to take care of her child, much less teach it. Any mother who copes with her worries and helps her child to cope with them is a good enough mother for her child.

What is important to say at the end of this article to summarize?

Probably, I want to say a banal phrase: loneliness is not a sentence. Yes, this is an unpleasant emotional state that can be quite painful and accompany a person from birth to death throughout life in one form or another. If we set ourselves the goal of learning to build those relationships that will not be formal, but will be able to fulfill our need for emotional closeness, then with the help of psychotherapy we can find inner resources to overcome those unconscious childhood traumas, to cope with the emotional pain of childhood from the position of our experience and start building relationships so that they bring us satisfaction. I still want to finish this article on an optimistic note: no matter how lonely and hard it is for you now, if you want and are ready to work on yourself, this can be corrected in psychotherapy, find the resources that will help you cope with all difficulties and start living more happily. And what I can say unequivocally: if you are reading this article now, it means that you survived and grew up, became a person, coped and you have the resources for this, you just need to find them and learn how to use them.