Chapter 1 Separation Anxiety in Psychoanalytic Practice Phantasies

‘Si tu veux un ami, apprivoise-moi!’

‘If you want a friend, tame me!’

Solitude has two faces: it may be a deadly counsellor, or, if tamed, it may become a friend of infinite worth. Can solitude be tamed? Is it possible to turn it into a genuine means of communication with oneself and with others?

In this book, I wish to show how solitude can be lived and transformed through the psychoanalytic experience, and how a sometimes hostile and desperate feeling of loneliness can gradually develop into a solitude tamed, constituting a foundation of trust for communication with oneself and with others.

This transition takes place by way of what we psychoanalysts call the working through of separation anxieties and object-loss anxieties, a process in which the psychological development of each individual and, in a similar way, the progress of the psychoanalytic relationship are manifested. Separation anxiety, where excessive, is the tragic fear of finding oneself alone and abandoned—the fount of psychical pain and the affect of mourning, as Freud showed in 1926. As loneliness, solitude may turn into a deadly abyss: ‘Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé’ [‘For the want of just one being, the world is void of human life’] (A.de Lamartine, L’Isolement). Conversely, when tamed, separation anxiety becomes a vivifying force: the taming of solitude is a matter not of eliminating anxiety but of learning to confront it and to use it in order to place it in the service of life. Feeling alone then means becoming aware that one is oneself unique and that the other is also unique; one’s relationship with

oneself and others now assumes infinite worth. This is how I understand the Little Prince when he says to the roses: ‘You are just the way my fox used to be. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand others. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in the world’ (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Pr