Chapter 12 The Capacity to be Alone, Buoyancy and the Integration of Psychical Life

‘Adieu, dit le renard. Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

—L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux, répéta le petit prince, afin de se souvenir.’

‘Goodbye,’ said the fox. ‘Here is my secret. It is very simple: you can only see properly with the heart. The essence of things is invisible to the eyes.’

‘The essence of things is invisible to the eyes,’ repeated the Little Prince, to be sure of remembering it.

One of the aims of analysis is for the analysand to discover or rediscover in himself feelings which excessive anxiety about separation and object-loss may have prevented him from acquiring or caused him to lose: the feeling of autonomy and psychical freedom, internal strength and continuity, trust in himself and other people, and the capacity to love and be loved—in a word, a whole complex of feelings which characterizes what we call psychical maturity, summed up so aptly by Winnicott (1958) as the acquisition of a capacity to be ‘alone in the presence of someone’ (p. 32). For Winnicott, there are two forms of solitude during the course of development, a primitive form at an immature stage and a more elaborate form:

Being alone in the presence of someone can take place at a very early stage, when the ego immaturity is naturally balanced by ego-support from the mother. In the course of time the individual introjects the ego-supportive mother and

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in this way becomes able to be alone without frequent reference to the mother or mother symbol

Contrasting with feelings of anxiety, this capacity to experience solitude as a replenishment of one's wellsprings, in relation to oneself and to other people, appears when the presence of the absent object is internalized. This progressive process of internalization is the specific result of the working through of repeated experiences of separations followed by reunions. During the co