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IN HER PAPER "LONELINESS" Frieda Fromm-Reichmann takes the phenomenon of loneliness and turns it this way and that, examining all its facets. Many of her observations are borne out by my
clinical experience. Her conclusion, and that of Sullivan and others, that pathological loneliness may be caused by a mother's premature weaning of the child from her tender attentions is certainly supported by my patients. One patient of mine, a successful painter, was largely neglected by a mother who did not want him and was in any case too deeply involved in her marriage to have time for real mothering. The boy was mothered by his father, but the father became ill when the child was four, and then he too neglected him and finally died when the boy was eight. Today, after four years of analysis, the patient still goes through periods of utter insatiability in his need for attention. Recently, a month of extremely productive work with this man came to a halt when he saw in my apartment a new book on the shelf, which he decided was a gift from another patient. This triggered a huge regression in which he told me that it was unthinking of me to expose him to any situation in which he might be faced with even a suggestion that I had any other patients but him. He must have me all to himself; only under those conditions could he find his way back to health.
Another patient, also neglected by her mother and not breastfed by her, asks me repeatedly what good analysis can do her if I cannot breast-feed her and thus give her what she missed in infancy. So that is one simple and often true explanation of pathological loneliness: it is sheer ravenousness on the part of one who was left hungry.
But as Zilboorg points out—and Fromm-Reichmann cites him—the cause may be also poor guidance in re