You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
At first glance, from the title the subject of this book seems obvious and straightforward. In clinical practice loneliness and longing are encountered almost daily. Ordinarily they are associated with grief or depression related to either loss of some important object, or, to existing intra-psychic states that make actual relationships too inflexible, conflicted, distant, needy, or otherwise impossible. Fortunately, this extraordinary, well written, and finely edited text takes the subject to an entirely more expanded level of understanding.
The book is the outgrowth of a symposium on the subject held in Vancouver, Canada in 2008 sponsored by the Western Canada Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Association, the Psychoanalytic Society of NYU, William Alanson White Society, the Adelphi Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and the Toronto Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Twenty six authors contributed a very wide variety of chapters on the subject of loneliness and longing. The material stretches across the entire psychoanalytic psychotherapy field from comparative theoretical formulations of loneliness, past and present, to multiple clinical case vignettes encountered in routine practice, to autobiographical disclosures of personal experience both clinical and developmental.
The stories of loneliness and longing portrayed are captivating. They include narratives of the effects of loss, trauma and death, and stories of online pornography and experiences in virtual reality. We read of loneliness with regard to addictive shopping, and the social shame felt in living as unmarried women alone. In addition to our relationship to the intra-psychic and the interpersonal, the relationship to nature, or,