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Most people don't understand the loneliness of the analyst. After all, we are never alone. Every forty-five (or fifty) minutes the bell rings and, like good Pavlovian subjects, we respond. Whatever just transpired, be it inspiring, unexceptional, or tragic (among many other possibilities), we ready our minds for the next occupant. We are rented by the hour, a circumstance that links us to the oldest profession. Constantly partnered, we are yet in danger of a form of loneliness that, at least in my experience, can be acutely painful. Writing offers me one of the very few effective balms.
What differentiates loneliness from aloneness, and makes it so hard to bear for all human beings? Fromm-Reichmann (1959) emphasizes that the profoundly lonely have given up hope that they will connect with others in the future. In addition, they see no redemptive purpose or meaning in their painful state. Loneliness can feel like an endless solitary confinement. Often it is accompanied by a shameful sense of meriting our isolation. Most of us, myself included, can call up bleak moments from early adolescence when loneliness felt more like a fate than a state.
Elsewhere (Buechler 1998, p. 138), applying Winnicott's thinking (1958) to the analyst's experience, I have suggested that the profoundly lonely analyst has failed to internalize a good enough “chorus” of empathic supervisors, colleagues, and other modulating influences. Profound loneliness can be the product of an overly harsh superego, criticizing every clinical interchange, alienating the analyst from him- or herself.
But even analysts who are well provided with empathic professional internal objects can suffer acute loneliness. With some patients, in some hours, we can feel they will never understand our experience as we do. We will be permanently alone with it. Perhaps we feel that the patient