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This collection of papers stems from a 2008 symposium held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Its aim is to rectify the oversight evident in the psychoanalytic literature of the painful emotions of loneliness and longing. So many patients speak of an inner loneliness, even in the company of others.
Loneliness is widespread in our urban culture. Although it is not cited here, a classic book on the topic comes to mind.1 I have always thought of chronic loneliness as resulting from a deficit in the establishment of a secure, soothing inner object, rather than the lack of actual companionship of an external object, but that is not a major theme of this book.
Twenty-six chapters cover a broad range of topics, e.g., loneliness in the consulting room; the relationship between loneliness and love; the effects of social networking and the Internet; how loneliness changes throughout the life cycle; and healing the analyst's loneliness. Some of the therapist-authors self-disclose as if they were talking to their own therapists, and I wondered what their patients might think upon reading what they wrote.
On the first page, a quotation from Harry Stack Sullivan—which defines loneliness as “an exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy, for interpersonal intimacy” —characterizes the interpersonal, intersubjective, and relational themes in this volume. Rebecca Curtis, one of the editors, sees loneliness as relational and notes the overlap between loneliness and depression. There are also Freudian and Kleinian perspectives in a few chapters and many clinical, self-disclosing, and applied psychoanalytic perspectives. Even though the title includes unconscious factors in the understanding of loneliness and longing, there is a paucity of acknowledgment of infantile loneliness that becomes repeated in later life, and more emphasis is placed on the lack of a mate as at the root of these feelings.