On Loneliness, Narcissism, and Intimacy

It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make a help meet for him.

In the planetarium of negative feelings and difficult-to-bear emotional states that provide a large part of the motivation needed to undergo psychoanalytic treatment, loneliness has its own stellar position. As an experienced feeling state, it differs from other central human emotions—such as love and hate, triumph and disappointment, envy and gratitude, and so on—in both quality (i.e., specific emotional tone and coloration) and implications. The experience of loneliness is certainly ubiquitous and frequently a clinical presenting problem. This ubiquity has made the nature and underlying conditions of loneliness a much discussed topic in literature, philosophy, and sociology, and is particularly prominent in existentialist writings. Its position in psychoanalysis, however, is much less secure and essential. While loneliness has been treated to some degree of clinical assessment, I believe that it has not yet been adequately investigated psychoanalytically and demands fuller and deeper understanding than has been accorded to it. One part of my argument will be that the consideration of the subject of loneliness by psychoanalysis founders on rocks of theoretical controversy that bias and unbalance its treatment in actual practice. A corollary is that it presents important issues for our consideration, such as the choice between a pre-oedipal “basic object need” point