Mixed Bag #8: Richard Gipps on Loneliness
Mixed Bag #8: Richard Gipps on Loneliness
“Mixed Bag” is a series where I ask an expert to select 5 items to explore a particular topic: a book, a concept, a person, an article, and a surprise item (at the expert’s discretion). For each item, they have to explain why they selected it and what it signifies. — Awais Aftab
Richard Gipps, PhD, DClinPsychol, philosopher and clinical psychologist, is in private practice as a psychotherapist in Oxford, UK, where he’s also a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall. His academic work focuses on the philosophy of psychiatry and the philosophy of psychoanalysis (he co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, and the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis), and he has a special interest in the philosophical understanding of psychosis (On Psychosis was published by Bloomsbury in 2022).
Book — Joel Backström’s The Fear of Openness (2007)
Gipps: Recommending a book on loneliness isn’t so easy. If you'll forgive me starting on a negative note: recent offerings tend to be thin and unconvincing, getting us little further than the trivial observations that loneliness isn’t the subjective registration of solitude or that we can be lonely in crowds, or implausibly attempting to reduce it to a cluster of other emotional states such as fear, anger, sorrow and resentment. An unhelpful analogy we're sometimes given is that loneliness stands to time with friends as hunger stands to eating — as if we couldn't long to see our friends without being lonely. Such works are, I’d say, often written from the unacknowledged point of view of a latently fearful and lonely age that doesn’t have the courage to love in a non-sentimental, i.e. a genuine, fashion. Their (often unwitting) evocative potency far outstrips their capacity to truly theorize their object. To ape Elizabeth Anscombe’s Modern Moral Philosophy, perhaps we might even say that: ‘It is not profitable at present for us to pursue the philosophy of loneliness. It should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of that love which is friendship, in which we are conspicuously lacking’.
With that in mind I want here to instead recommend Joel Backström’s The Fear of Openness (Åbo Akademi University Press, 2007). Backstrom rarely mentions loneliness, but his very rich (and freely available) work on friendship and the roots of morality nevertheless takes us to the heart of the dynamic which eventuates in it. What’s at stake in friendship, as Backström discloses it for us, is our desire for openness with one another in an entirely wholehearted human encounter. We know intuitively of the goodness of friendship’s love, just as we know intuitively of the wrongness of shutting ourselves off from one another in fear or resentment. (Striking about Backström’s thesis is how his rich and relentlessly honest exposition of friendship and conscience enables him to pursue a Nietzschian ‘revaluation of all (sorts of) values’ - such as respect, duty, rights, praise, blame, pride, shame, modestly, loyalty, reciprocity, altruism, and sacrifice - showing how often what we think of as ethically exemplary is really but a result of the deployment of defences against our anxieties about openness.)
With Backström’s understanding of the existential significance of friendship in clear view we are, I think, in a rather better position to start to risk an understanding of what’s at stake in our difficulties with loneliness. As I see it, what we might call ‘ordinary loneliness’ requires you to have maintained your sense of the good that is friendship—the good of being known and loved and valued for who you are, the good of making others’ good your own, the good of being accompanied in your darker hours—but to find oneself bereft of that in one’s current circumstance. A deeper form of loneliness—let’s call it ‘soul loneliness’—also requires that one maintains the living knowledge of the good of friendship, but now one struggles to trust in its possibility for you. All the love, in this dismal secular Christmas-tide of the soul (Christmas: surely the iconic moment of loneliness in our present age), is now elsewhere, obtaining ‘over there between the others’; I however am exiled from it - I’m ‘all alone’; I have ‘no one to talk to’. (Notice how suspiciously easy it is to both go deaf to the soul of such phrases and then start pretending that what the lonely need more o f is just other people about them, conversational partners, family, etc.) A still deeper form of loneliness—I call it ‘loneliness-beyond-loneliness’—will be treated of below.
A deeper form of loneliness—let’s call it ‘soul loneliness’—also requires that one maintains the living knowledge of the good of friendship, but now one struggles to trust in its possibility for you.
Concept — The capacity to be alone
Gipps: A concept many clinicians - myself included - have found helpful is that of the capacity to be alone; it’s owed to the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott who talked of the significance of the capacity to bear, perhaps enjoy, solitude — and also of our ability to be ‘alone in the presence of someone’. Psychotherapists will be well aware of the different kinds of silence that can fill the therapeutic space. He who suffers an inability to be alone will experience silence in company as deeply awkward. He feels the need to fill the space; becomes self-conscious; and so on. Contrast the child who’s happily playing by herself on the living room floor, mother sitting reading the paper in the background. This child trusts that she doesn’t have to perform to be accepted by mother. She’s not on edge regarding mother’s love for her. She can, therefore, relax and happily remain ‘in her own world’. She doesn’t, in her soul, doubt the possibility of her lovability. (Notice, by the way, how suspiciously easy it is to use ethologically-inspired terms like ‘secure attachment’ — instead of, say, ‘belovedness’ — when discussing this.) The lonely ones, however, struggle to be alone; they haven’t been able to ‘introject the ego-supportive mother’.
I want to add that one reason we can struggle to be alone is because company can be a good distraction from our distrust in the availability of love and from our insecurities about our lovability and capacity to love (i.e. ordinary and soul loneliness). It can of course also famously trigger these insecurities, hence the painful loneliness that more ‘introverted’ people feel at parties. (What goes by the names ‘introversion’ and ‘extraversion' are often, I suggest, ways that we defend against our fear of openness. We hide away from such situations as risk provoking our fears of unlovability, or we push out and over these fears rather than staying in touch with them whilst encountering the other in a spirit of loving openness. Correlatively the very use of the concepts of introversion and extraversion to describe oneself and others can, as I see it, also function as a defense - as if what was being talked about were just behavioral variables, a matter of which sort of meaning-voided solitary or social power socket one will plug oneself into ‘to recharge’.) But at other times the practices of mere sociality can near enough resemble that which we desire in our hearts, i.e. actual friendship, that it successfully disguises from us our real need and fear.
Article — Loneliness by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1959)
Gipps: The psychoanalysts Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Melanie Klein, both divorced, spent the later years of their lives rather alone, devoted to their work. Klein lost a son and became alienated from her daughter and from many colleagues including those who had previously been close to her. Fromm-Reichmann was well-loved yet suffered the isolation of hereditary deafness. The final paper of each was on loneliness. Klein’s, published in 1963, was entitled On the Sense of Loneliness. Fromm-Reichmann’s, published in 1959 after she died, was simply called Loneliness. (Donald Winnicott’s The Capacity to Be Alone came out in 1958.) Fromm-Reichmann’s is to my mind the more compelling essay.
‘Loneliness’, Fromm-Reichmann says, ‘seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it. This avoidance seems to include a strange reluctance on the part of psychiatrists to seek scientific clarification of the subject.’ Hence it’s ‘one of the least satisfactorily conceptualized psychological phenomena, not even mentioned in most psychiatric textbooks.’ The loneliness in which she’s particularly interested is a severe form: uncommunicable, deeply threatening, disintegrative, leading if unchecked to psychosis. It involves an unmet need for intimacy in those she and her colleague Harry Stack Sullivan call ‘the lonely ones’.
Fromm-Reichmann begins where all good psychotherapeutic investigation begins: by (as I would put it, borrowing words from the hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’) interpreting by love. That is, she discloses to us truths about our soul’s predicament by looking at its travails through love’s lens, starting with Réne Spitz’s observations on the actually fatal influence of lack of love, and of the consequent loneliness, on infants. A dearth of real attention and acceptance hits the pre-schizophrenic or pre-personality-disordered subject hard, she suggests, because of his innate sensitive responsiveness regarding love and intimacy. The resultant ‘situation forms the cradle of his later loneliness and simultaneous yearning for, yet fear of, interpersonal closeness.’ The unloved child, to escape being laughed at or punished for living in substitutive fantasy, withdraws further into social isolation. And premature separation from the loving tenderness of mother forms the ‘roots for permanent aloneness and isolation’ - for what, borrowing Suttie’s phrase, Fromm-Reichmann calls “love-shyness”—i.e. an enduring fear of intimacy and tenderness. The result is what I’d call ‘loneliness beyond loneliness’—a form of loneliness so deep and wide that it’s utterly ungraspable by thought i.e., unconscious. One forgets that there ever really were others in one’s life; the inner and outer worlds and the future become denuded of other people. A striking feature of her paper is her engagement with the writings of such poets and philosophers who, she says, typically have a better handle on the phenomenon than do the psychiatrists.
The result is what I’d call ‘loneliness beyond loneliness’—a form of loneliness so deep and wide that it’s utterly ungraspable by thought i.e., unconscious. One forgets that there ever really were others in one’s life; the inner and outer worlds and the future become denuded of other people.
Consider the following example of Fromm-Reichmann’s theme. Last week, catching up with a friend over a beer, a solo Indian man, drunk, schizophrenic, came into the pub and sat near us, holding a conversation with nobody yet in a sense intended for us. His loud chatter was filled with disconcerting, penetrating, animal sounds which conveyed both self-derision and hostility. After a while my friend and I moved to a more comfortable sofa in another room—at which point he got up and moved again to be near us. His longing for love along with his love-shyness were palpable, as was the loneliness-beyond-loneliness that dripped from his lips as he angrily announced to the friendless room that he was now leaving.
Person — Jesus of Nazareth
Gipps: I’ve found it difficult to pick one particular person whose words or life speak of or to loneliness. Should I tell of Dorothy Day, author of The Long Loneliness, legendary Catholic social activist? Of Fromm-Reichmann’s remarkable colleague Harry Stack Sullivan; who did so much to move and work through his own inner desolation; who had such extraordinary sympathy for ‘the lonely ones’ - the truly unwell patients they cared for at Chestnut Lodge? Of Janet Frame, remarkable New Zealand memoirist and psychiatric survivor; aptly diagnosed by her psychology professor John Money as suffering a ‘loneliness of the inner soul’; who wrote in her memoir An Angel at My Table: "I inhabited a territory of loneliness which ... resembles the place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return, living, to the world bring, inevitably, a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession.”? No, I’ve decided I shall, writing as I am in the Lenten period, instead make a brief mention of Jesus of Nazareth.
What does the life and message of this man who ‘prayed in lonely places’ — whose dying words, quoting Psalm 22:1, suggest he knew something of loneliness (‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’) — have to say about the matter? A quick answer might make mention of his being ‘a friend to the friendless’, and in no manner do I want to disparage that idea. But we must be alert to the possibility of it manifesting a regressive and undignified wish-fulfilling fantasy to those who are all alone in this world; a two millennia old imaginary friend. We might have hoped for more.
A more helpful tack to take, I suggest, concerns itself with one of Jesus’s injunctions concerning friendship (John 15: 10-14): to ‘abide in My love …. so that My joy may remain in you, and your joy may be complete. This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you.’ This is coming from a man who did indeed lay down His life to promote His redemptive message of love’s centrality to a meaningful life. Who actually spelled out what he meant by friendship with Him, i.e.: our love for others. Who in this way invites us: to clear aside our self-involved preoccupations, and direct our attention outwards onto others’ needs. To not let the fear of openness occlude our capacity to love and be loved. To do all this because it was commanded, i.e. because it’s the right thing to do. To know that you’re lovable not because you are in fact loved by others but because regardless of that you’re in touch with the value of love, because it yet burns like a gentle fire in your heart, because you’re willing to give of it. To stem the pain of loneliness by staying alive to the sense of lovability which arises out of that inner flame. And to know of your worth, of your own lovability, precisely because you’ve been willing to practice love’s openness.
Surprise Item — The Lonesome Touch, album by Dennis Cahill and Martin Hayes (1997)
Gipps: Some years ago a folk musician friend of mine introduced me to the enchanting music of Chicago-based (but County Clare-hailing) fiddler Martin Hayes and his (recently deceased) guitar-playing friend Dennis Cahill. We went to hear them in concert; I was so struck by their lilt and lyricism. The ‘surprise item’ of which I want to make mention here is their album The Lonesome Touch. That phrase comes from County Clare in Ireland, and describes a person’s music: an ‘elusive and essential quality’, ‘a sadness, a blue note, a sour note’ which ‘bares the trace of struggle and of pain’ yet is ‘also the means of uplift, transcendence to joy and celebration.’ In the sleeve notes Hayes tells of how ‘Many of the old musicians had this special draiocht’ [enchantment, wizardry]. ‘Some of them weren’t technical virtuosos, but through the honesty of their expression they could touch your heart. It is this quality that has driven and inspired me all of my musical life. I have found that you can never possess it, you can only yield to it. It demands honesty and humility. Only on rare occasions have I really been able to express completely from this point. For the most part it still remains the unobtainable horizon, the object of inspiration and motivation.’
Now I’ve no idea what Hayes would make of what I’m about to say, but the question I’ve found myself asking over the years since is just how the expression of lonesomeness is supposed to be the means to ‘uplift, transcendence to joy and celebration’. And what comes to my mind is how loneliness can get so baked into our soul’s fabric that it’s not only itself thereby rendered mute (it becomes a life’s silent background framework rather than a movement within it) but also there freezes over such of that soul’s inner movements as more broadly constitute the affective life. By turning solid loneliness into liquid, then, through his expressive playing, Hayes is able thereby to also render motile the soul so that it can once again also experience joy and celebration. That, at least, is how it strikes me: that the condition of possibility of true joy, the recovery of friendship, the retrieval of inner and outer openness, and the availability of a love-framed vision of our lives is that a prior thawing and mobilization of the pains of loneliness obtain within the containing safety of the music’s drift.
See previous posts in the “Mixed Bag” series