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Loneliness in this article is discussed in order to make it more discernable. Psychoanalytic literature has been surveyed relevant to loneliness and related issues. Noted is the importance of individualism in America, citing Thoreau as a model for individualism. Edgar Allan Poe's story “The Man of the Crowd” is discussed to illustrate desperate loneliness. The topic of loneliness connects to issues of empathy, loneliness in treatment, the countertransference response to loneliness, the study of self experience, and the problems created by the use of the term identity. The historical perspective indicates how we are time bound to the vocabulary, theories, ideas and myths of our era, to which, in our loneliness, we cling.
Loneliness is one of the most common types of human distress and can lead to behavior geared to lessening its intensity. Yet the feeling state of loneliness remains a neglected one in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Fromm-Reichmann (1959) noted that loneliness is “not even mentioned in most psychiatric text books” (p. 325). Grinstein's Index (1966) had but 12 entries under loneliness. Weiss (1973) comments on our ignorance of the various expressions of loneliness.
In this paper I will survey the psychoanalytic literature related to loneliness, discuss Thoreau's Walden which has become part of the myth of the individual in America and use Edgar Allan Poe's story “The Man of the Crowd” to illustrate one of the most desperate of lonely states. Included are comments about empathy with the lonely, the therapist's loneliness, why the topic of loneliness has