Aloneness in Psychoanalysis and Spirituality

“Religion,” Alfred North Whitehead (1926, p. 16) wrote, “is what the individual does with his own solitariness.” In this passage Whitehead is giving a particularly profound reading of religion, that is, he is not speaking of organized belief or ritual practices but of what many, today, would describe as spirituality. Given Whitehead's approach we can define spirituality as that area of human experience interested in exploring individual solitariness. Such a definition focuses on each individual's task to find what is most real and consequently true for him or her; it does not, in itself, entail any necessary presupposition or definition of any Transcendent Other (God). Such a definition allows for Eastern Buddhist thought as well as Western Judeo-Christian mystical traditions — particularly as manifested in such a profound thinker as the thirteenth-century theologian mystic Meister Eckhart. Within this context I understand spirituality in a most generic sense; I am not equating it with mysticism,1 a classification of experience (Western or Eastern) that has a more specific meaning in terms of what human beings identify as the divine. If Donald Winnicott (1958) is right when he speaks of religion and culture, psychoanalysis and play as having their seedbeds in the transitional space of childhood, then we can note that psychoanalysis is also concerned with the solitariness of the individual. How we can understand such solitariness is the primary focus of this essay; such solitariness, although a bedrock of therapeutic psychoanalytic practice, is of a different order than resolution of conflict or coming to terms with what fate has dealt us. Winnicott (1965, p. 187) also writes of the quiet alone space that each individual possesses and which no one,