Loneliness and its discontents

We all have friends with whom we like to talk about specific things because of shared interests and experiences. You might have a music friend or a stand-up comedy friend. You might have a shopping friend or beach or basketball friend. A few years ago, before he passed away, I used to make biannual trips up to Brookline, Massachusetts in order to visit my friend Stanley Cavell. 

Stanley was a retired philosopher at Harvard and I'd shoot my Black VW Beetle up I-95 to have lunch with him and talk old movies, Wittgenstein, and jazz. He had never been a teacher of mine, but we had met one summer in Santa Fe at a conference about Ralph Waldo Emerson at which he led a seminar. Over a meal, we had hit it off, bonding over the story I told him about the time Groucho Marx and T. S. Eliot had dinner together. Ironically, Stanley lived just a few blocks from where earlier in my life I had spent some of the darkest days of my substance abuse and isolation while subletting a cramped apartment in Boston's Kenmore Square with a part-time pot dealer. That was probably part of the allure of visiting him, I confess – letting my middle-life self have an excuse to superimpose the present over the vestiges of that painful past.

Once, over our usual sushi lunch, I asked Stanley whether he ever felt lonely. I'm not sure why I had asked such a probing, perhaps uncomfortable question. He had a terrific wife, Cathleen, after all, and I knew that his kids, all of whom were just a bit younger than I, regularly visited him. Maybe I asked because he'd been retired for a while and I wondered if he missed students, missed being in the classroom. Maybe I felt it was alright to ask this because at the time, he was then in his late seventies, he was writing his memoir, Little Did I Know. Between his various books and from our conversations, I knew some of his life story, of course. Stanley had studied music in college; that is, before a crisis of depression had sent him into a new direction, deep into an emotional labyrinth. First, by way of Sigmund Freud's heady psychoanalytic theories and then by philosophy itself, Stanley had found the thread through that maze of the heart. Despite the more than forty-year age difference between us, that early-life crisis was something we had in common. 

My own interest in philosophy had never been academic. People turn to philosophy for all sorts of reasons. Some people are drawn to the fun of arguing over minute, technical details. Others are drawn to pondering heady questions. My own interest had been much more desperate, at least at first. I realized that philosophy was in some respects a conversation that had been going on for eons, a conversation of people simply trying to make sense of life, each trying to make their way out of the labyrinth, and show people it was possible. Philosophy may not get you out of such places, but it gets you following something forward, and sometimes that's what is necessary to simply not feel lost. 

"Was that why you left music? The loneliness?" I asked again. My own hours spent in the practice room when I was a serious music student studying jazz and classical percussion had often made me feel walled off from others. While we chatted, I glanced through the window, looked down a block where I used to stumble along the sidewalk, a half-empty bottle of whiskey tucked into my coat pocket. 

He laughed. It was avuncular, gruff, yet, I like to think, understanding. I couldn't quite tell if he knew what I was getting at, which, to be honest, is a not uncommon feeling I have when talking to a lot of people. As he dipped his tuna into a small bowl of soy sauce, Stanley looked at me and swirled his chopsticks for slight emphasis. 

"Richard, you really ought to read Melanie Klein." Dabbing the corner of his mouth, he signaled for the check. That's all he said on the matter, but, as usual, he was right.

One of the truly great minds

A protégé of Freud, Melanie Klein, though not necessarily a household name, was of course a pioneer of 20th-century psychoanalysis, and remains one of the truly great minds in the field. She wasn't a philosopher, but her version of psychoanalysis, like Freud's, was an attempt to learn how to live a life, consciously, intentionally, which sounds a lot like a philosophical struggle to be awake to ourselves. As a graduate student studying literary theory, I had read a little of her work, but Stanley's recommendation came from the fact that she was one of the first people to consider loneliness as itself being a condition worth investigating from a psychoanalytic perspective. 

In her famous characterization of the feeling of loneliness, Klein described its pain as "the result of a ubiquitous yearning for an unattainable perfect internal state." That is to say, it's natural, it's everywhere; we all, at some level, feel it. In my own case, I came to match this with both a persistent feeling of being without a place I truly belonged and with a need, when I was using drugs and alcohol, to find a way to mask that yearning even from myself. If I'm interested in finding the source of loneliness, it's crucial to establish its psychological foundations, and Klein found that it leads us back to the very beginning of what we call a self. 

For Klein, we begin to fragment as soon as we see ourselves as separate from our mothers. We then set in motion a pattern of projecting onto others what we believe to be missing in our deepest selves. Looking at Klein's thinking about loneliness, one is apt to see certain patterns drawn from the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Thrown from the proverbial (and preverbal) garden when we pass through infanthood, we realize that we are beings separate and distinct from first our mothers and then all others as well. In the wake of that early revelation, we become self-conscious, and that feeling of difference and separateness from others amplifies, intensifies, and so develops along with that the commensurate longing to get back to that paradise of being indistinguishably connected to another person, a paradise that never really existed, even in memory. Someone, we hope, will come along and make us feel complete, and restore us to that feeling of wholeness, someone who will, in effect, redeem us from our isolations; yet only in romantic comedies does it happen that someone says, earnestly, "you complete me," and that completion becomes a persistent, stable actuality. 

Such an idea that others provide the missing parts of our fractured, fragmented selves reverberates as far back as ancient Greece: Aristophanes, in Plato's Symposium, contemplating the nature of love, suggested that humans were once four-armed, four-legged, and two-headed animals, until the gods, out of anger, split us in two, and so we are now always searching for our other half. In real life that magical other half never arrives. Those phantom parts of ourselves that feel lost or estranged are projected onto others, and, so the thinking goes, to be wholly accepted by others is to be able to regain those lost pieces and become complete. According to that line of thinking, we are only ever merely partial versions of who and what we really are and what anyone wants is, primarily, to feel whole, a state which Klein indicates is impossible to actually achieve. 

According to Klein, it isn't just emotional distance or proximity in regards to other people that determines to what degree we feel lonely. What we seek is a profound depth and intensity of connection, and best of all would be a state in which we are so completely seen and acknowledged by another that the relationship can be one of wordlessness; we wouldn't actually need to speak. "However gratifying it is in later life to express thoughts and feelings to a congenial person," she wrote in her essay, "there remains an unsatisfied longing for an understanding without words – ultimately for the earliest relation with the mother. This longing contributes to the sense of loneliness and derives from the depressive feeling of an irretrievable loss." We call the frustration that arises from the perpetual feeling of yearning for those lost pieces of the self loneliness. Nevertheless, that yearning exists despite and beyond the feeling of irretrievable loss and is the catalyst for us coming to look at ourselves, to discover who we are, and how we came to be that way. 

'Do you ever feel lonely?'

Klein's conscious interest in loneliness crystalized for her one evening in 1959, when she was 76, in her rather modest, very British flat at 20 Bracknell Gardens, an affluent northwest section of Hampstead, an area in North London. The Austrian-born Klein had first moved to London in 1926 at the beginning of her career. It had become her adopted home. Wandering into her kitchen one evening, she ran into her housekeeper, Kathleen Cutler, who had been in her employ for five years by that point. Theirs was a warm relationship.

"Do you ever feel lonely?" she asked Miss Cutler. It was an abrupt question, especially coming from an employer who also happened to be a preeminent psychoanalyst, yet that very question was why Stanley sent me to reading Klein, whose body of work continues to help shape our understanding of the emotional lives of human beings. Shot through with these feelings, I want to understand not just my own longing, but I want to learn what role loneliness plays in people's lives as well. Why do we feel it at all? I want to learn how we might discover the language for loneliness, so we don't feel trapped in its inexpressibility. Ironically – or not – Klein's very question about someone else's feelings of loneliness is a way to collapse that experience of emotional isolation. 

When she asked it, Klein may have been directing her question as much to herself as to her housekeeper through a deft but legible bit of projection. Days earlier, Klein had answered the phone only to hear tragic news: the young son of her friend, collaborator, and former assistant, Lola Brook, had died when the plane he was in crashed. Klein, stricken, caught up in a daze of mourning, hovered through the house for weeks, distracted by empathy for her friend and a grief over lost children that bubbled up from her own past. Two of Klein's siblings had died when she herself was quite young, and her own son, Hans, had died in a fall in the Alps in April of 1934 when he was 27. Speculation had long since been that Hans's fall wasn't an accident, but rather a suicide. Such rumors had been floated even by Klein's antagonistic daughter, Melitta, herself a formidable psychoanalyst, who bore deep resentments towards her mother about emotional injuries, both real and imagined. 

The question, "Do you ever feel lonely?" is the sort that hangs in the air, intimate, disarmingly direct, an entreaty to vulnerability. I wonder, looking over my own life, if periodic intensity is a symptom or a cause of loneliness. By nature, it's a way of being in the world that can make you feel out of phase. Or, despite the intensity, was the question a way of teasing out a confession? Maybe, in part, it had been just that kind of solicitation when Klein asked it of Miss Cutler, who had been her housekeeper since 1953. She was a psychoanalyst after all, so no question about feelings and one's interiority would ever be wholly neutral with her. But then the question itself also suggests an admission by Klein of feeling lonely herself. The very question elicits the possibility of parallel lonelinesses. It takes one to know one, in other words. When I asked it of Stanley, it was, I can admit it, an attempt to see if we had that in common, and if his being decades older than I would give me some indication of how to navigate those feelings over a lifetime. If he could admit it – someone with his experience, knowledge, and stature – then maybe I might be more comfortable with my own feelings. On the other hand, he never did answer my question directly.

Klein, after she asked, drifted out of the room again, as if not expecting a response, or as if she were sheltering back deep within her own ruminations. With the question reverberating, she turned inward and began to write, as if writing would conjure a talisman to hold against the pain of separation and loss. It was the first step in her embarking on an important, and poignant, exploration of what it means to feel alone. Freud, der Meister, had written his magisterial "Mourning and Melancholia," one of his profoundest essays and perhaps his most personal on the subject of grief, an essay drafted in his rooms at Berggasse 19 in the heart of Vienna, amidst the horrors of the first World War, his three sons having been conscripted into the Austrian army. On her side, Klein wrote her last great essay, "On the Sense of Loneliness," in the final years of her life, an essay that wouldn't be published until three years after her death in 1960. From her archives, however, we can see clear evidence in notes she made that loneliness was so much on her mind that she was planning to write an entire book on the subject. In the essay she argued how, whether we are young, middle-aged, or old, a prevailing feeling of loss is the basso continuo of human experience, and though sometimes it can be managed or diminished, it cannot ever be fully eliminated. Still, if we learn that such a feeling of loss is a truth we all share, and consequently learn the truth of loneliness, the isolation loses its edge and urgency.

The parentheses of a life

Klein's own life story, which I discuss more fully in my book, This Exquisite Loneliness, informs her theories on loneliness, which have remained central to our contemporary discussions about the feeling. Completing her essay 'On the Sense of Loneliness', the masterpiece of her mature work, just a year before her death from colon cancer at the age of 78, she complained of persistent tiredness and significant pain from her ongoing osteoarthritis. Her body was much on her mind those days. Klein wasn't one to settle into maudlin reverie on her own mortality, but rather she was prompted to explore her own feeling state, to plumb its depths, and to do so through the act of writing. Reports from friends and colleagues indicate that in her final years she was feeling keenly again a degree of grief over losses and separations that had marked her life when she was younger, which would contextualize a sense of loneliness as being the very opening and closing parentheses of a life. 

As any good psychoanalyst knows, to understand the present, a person has to investigate, acknowledge, and even own their past. Klein based her ideas on the belief that our earliest childhood experiences, even the preverbal ones, help determine our emotional lives as adults. Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships of reality," she insisted, "it must be asserted that just the opposite is true. What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones, and that every child in the first years of life goes through an immeasurable degree of suffering." 

Looking at other examples of lonely people, in whatever form, has for me come to be a way of locating myself struggling alongside other struggling selves. It is a way to learn vigilance. Loneliness, whatever else it might be, is subjective perception. This is why a person by herself in the middle of nowhere – by a lake in northern Wisconsin, say – may not at all feel lonely, yet that same person can, at another point in time, find herself in a bustling city and feel shot through with loneliness, as if the feeling is some atmosphere all around her, as if it is the very air she breathes. We would understand why someone trapped on a desert island would be lonely, yet, as most of us can attest, someone in the middle of a densely compacted city can also feel intense loneliness, although scores of people are all around, the streets fairly teeming with other souls with which to interact. To look at the lives of other people it is a way to find the context for loneliness and to see what some people have done to navigate that "ubiquitous yearning."  From Klein's own words we see she herself believed, "deep understanding of others is always linked with a deeper understanding of one's self; and incapacity to do so always implies a lack of insight into one's own processes and parts of one's self."

We might want to think about loneliness not as merely more or less access to other people, but rather as some ratio of intimacy with others. Also, I want to ask, what if as human beings it isn't that we desire intimacy, but we actually need it, the way one needs food, say, or sleep? To what degree is loneliness a natural response to certain experiences and events? That would mean that intense, prolonged loneliness beyond a certain point can become a form of emotional or even spiritual starvation. In any event, I feel loneliness first, wherever and however it occurs, and then, if I am to understand it, I trace it back to where I can find a source. But what if I am the source? Will I find myself if I follow that loneliness all the way back? And then what? The enduring desire to be understood and accepted by others, to be in that sense completed by others, is at the heart of loneliness.

Behind this impulse to learn about my own loneliness by way of other people's experiences is the idea that there are least two different categories of loneliness. There is acute loneliness, which arises in reaction to specific events and can, thus, fade over time. This type of loneliness is a reaction to a loss of a particular someone or to changing of particular circumstances. Ultimately, we can think of this as a form of mourning. That might not need deep consideration to understand because it is so tied to a clear cause. The other kind of loneliness, however, is what I am hoping to drag into the light: the kind of loneliness that is so deeply felt that it is not only what we might describe as chronic but is somehow the very stuff of a person's emotional DNA. The context of a person's life will reveal the warp and woof of that kind of feeling. Or so I hope. 

United

It's no accident that Klein came back to the subject of loneliness and grief near the end of her life. With evidence of her own mortality becoming an everyday feature of her late seventies, certain feelings would of course be stirred. In the notes for "On the Sense of Loneliness," Klein observed, "Particularly in childhood the actual death of a sibling or a parent leaves deep marks, and the fear of death which is stirred up by such losses increases loneliness." As consciousness of her own mortality became more marked, understandably her loneliness deepened. It also sent her back to the death of Sidonie, her sister who died when they were mere children. When Klein was just four years old, Sidonie succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of eight. The loss, understandably, was profound and traumatized the family, not the least because she was the family favorite. For instance, Libussa, Melanie's mother, herself a beautiful woman, had felt Sidonie was the best looking of all the children, an opinion that she didn't hesitate to let Melanie know.

Sidonie's death hit Klein particularly badly. They were close, of course, but in many ways Sidonie, as a warm, compassionate eight-year-old, was a formative influence on Klein. Whereas the others teased little Melanie, it was Sidonie who had taken it upon herself to help teach her youngest sister how to read and write. In a family in which learning was counted as a deep value, that was no small gesture. 

"It is quite possible that I idealize her a little, but my feeling is that, had she lived, we would have been the greatest friends," Klein would later write in 1959, at the end of her life, in the pages of her unpublished autobiography, adding, "I have a feeling that I never entirely got over the feeling of grief for her death. I also suffered under the grief my mother showed, whereas my father was more controlled. I remember that I felt that my mother needed me all the more now that Sidonie was gone." In the years that followed, Melanie was forced to take up the psychic space of two daughters within the family, one real and present, the other a haunting absence.

There were other losses, including the sudden death of her handsome, gifted, troubled brother, Emmanuel, the only one of her family who ever really could understand Melanie on her own terms. Only he had made her feel less alone. When Melanie was just twenty, Emanuel, Klein's charming, handsome older brother – a musician, a writer, a medical school dropout, their father's clear favorite throughout their time growing up – died, shockingly, of heart failure at the age of 25 in Genoa, far from his sister. The heart problems were part of a medical condition he had had his whole life, which arose from an early bout of scarlet fever that worsened into rheumatic fever, an inflammatory disease that develops when certain kinds of infections aren't sufficiently treated. The resulting complications caused his immune system to turn on his body's tissues and as a consequence his heart's valves were gravely damaged. His heart's fragility may have been a factor in his desire to play out a Romantic ideal as he grew up. He spent his post-adolescence living as a bohemian writer and musician traveling around Europe, never settling down, drinking heavily and indulging in "medicinal" cocaine use. Rather than committing to medical school and becoming a mere echo of his conservative, emotionally withdrawn father, Emanuel, slim, charmingly brooding, wanted to find his way in the world through art. 

Young Melanie, to put it simply, was dazzled by Emanuel. Since the time he and Melanie were small children, he had been the family member she felt was the most supportive of her. Despite his rebelliousness and his tendency to be restless, Melanie described her brother as her "friend, confidant, and teacher." The affection and admiration were reciprocal. In a letter sent from Rome in January of 1901, Emanuel reproached Melanie for her suspicious-minded "superintelligence" that caused her to be jealous of a girl, Irma, a mutual friend who was visiting him in that city where he was then staying for a few months. Offhandedly, sweetly, he offered a parenthetical in the same letter: "I realize more every day that you are the most intelligent and beautiful person in the world." Small wonder, then, that Klein would write, tellingly, when she was in her seventies, "The illness of my brother and his early death is another of the griefs in my life, which always remain alive to me." Emanuel's was then the second death that Klein acknowledged that she spent her life grieving. 

Every loss that Klein experienced in her later years would cause these primary instances of grief and loneliness to flare up in her mind again, and deepen her sense that the people who most understood her were given to vanishing from her life, returning her to feelings of deep isolation and alienation.

"But I think of my childhood as one of a good family life and I would give anything for one day of having it back again; the three of us, my brother, my sister and myself sitting round the table and doing our school work, and the many details of united family life," she would write in her autobiography. "United" is quite a resonant word here. She calls it a good life, but we also see that she describes it that way in a moment of longing, lit by a flash of idealizing nostalgia, perhaps for a past that never quite existed in reality. It is a vision of the past that the rest of her life seems to stand outside of.

Part of that effort to revisit and reclaim the past we see in her setting to work on the autobiography she wrote but never published. "On the Sense of Loneliness" reflects on this gesture to the past. Klein wrote, "Another defense, particularly in old age, is the preoccupation with the past in order to avoid the frustrations of the present. Some idealization of the past is bound to enter into these memories and is put into the service of defense. In young people, some measure of idealization of people and causes is a normal defense and is part of the search for idealized inner objects which is projected on to the external world." Writing about loneliness in her old age and finding its origins at the very beginnings of life is the opposite of sentimentality.

Klein's biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, was suspicious of the ways that Klein in her unpublished memoir described a cold, distant set of familial relationships, and yet then expressed a wish to have those days back again. Grosskurth took that as a romanticization and saw it as an attempt by Klein to reframe for an audience the resentments she felt towards her family, resentments for them dying young, for being detached or controlling. There's another way to see it, however. Klein's efforts may have been instead an outgrowth of her wanting to forgive those who died, to spare these phantoms her anger. By moving to forgiveness for all the wrongs they perpetrated, all the slights, all the hurts, and the ultimate betrayal – however irrational – that death can seem like, Klein took steps towards reintegrating all the far-flung parts of her psyche. "If we have become able, deep in our unconscious minds, to clear our feelings to some extent towards our parents of grievances, and have forgiven them for the frustrations we had to bear, then we can be at peace with ourselves and are able to love others in the true sense of the word." If we can forgive our parents, or anyone else for that matter, the inadvertent wrongs they did us, the gift we receive is freedom. 

This is not to say that we can ever fully reintegrate all the disparate fragments and splinters of our selves that we see reflected back to us in the behavior of other people. We can never erase that first split and seam of the self separating from the mother. In the end, Klein believed each of us is the wellspring of our own feelings of isolation, going back to the very beginning of life. She insisted, "although loneliness can be diminished or increased by external influences, it can never be completely eliminated, because the urge towards integration, as well as the pain experienced in the process of inte­gration, spring from internal sources which remain powerful throughout life." It would be easy to see this as bleak, even fatalistic: we're doomed to loneliness. Yet, another perspective is possible. The pain may spring from powerful internal sources, but so does the urge to try to integrate our feelings. The drive to try and feel whole, which seems incontestably healthy and enriching, grows out of the soil of that suffering. To put it another way, hope only comes when one has a need for overcoming current circumstances. The need to be whole only comes from suffering a feeling of being fragmented. Wanting to connect with others means a willingness to work towards understanding them, and to understand others is to find a way to discover ourselves. And the inside becomes the outside; and the outside becomes the inside.

Clearly, to understand her own feelings of isolation, Klein was searching for the origins of loneliness in anyone's life. If we're to trace the roots of our loneliness, to find out where any of us are, we need to search back to our own individual beginnings so as to discover that first, that original experience of separateness. Klein's late work remains so important in part because she moved the focus from biological and instinctual drives to interpersonal relationships (contra Freudian dogma), and looked to how our earliest relationships inform the rest of our lives even at the most unconscious level. As infants, we each discover that our mother is separate from us and yet that lost memory of being a unified whole – the moment before separation, when we were so completely known that language was unnecessary – is an illusion that we chase for the rest of our lives. That means the self we become is born out of this loneliness: our identity is essentially founded on a conflict formed from that separation and the yearning to reverse that separation. It's who we are. 

That loneliness is central to each of us, in some ways it is the very flashpoint where identity separates and becomes its own condition. As fundamental as loneliness might be, it does not mean that we're doomed by it. For Klein, recognizing the situation, confronting it, was part of the process of coming to accept it, of working to undo its traumatic effects, and to not be constantly surprised by feelings of isolation and emotional distance.

The enduring and yet unresolvable desire to be understood and accepted by other people, to be completed by others, is at the heart of loneliness, even though that completion is never fully possible. Yet that desire to feel whole is the reason we are compelled to reach out from our own state of separateness in order to connect with other human beings. Such ambivalence is inescapable, but it also makes caring about others so necessary. Even if we can't be fully free of loneliness, can't completely slip loose from the distraction it causes or, yes, even if we cannot dodge its pain, it can provide a kind of forward momentum. Loneliness can be a catalyst that propels us towards wanting to feel whole, wanting to feel complete. Without that, we might never seek to understand ourselves better. As Klein showed, even if we cannot feel whole, we can keep discovering ourselves and our possibilities anew, but only if we look hard at where our feelings come from.

Richard Deming is a poet, art critic, and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. He teaches at Yale University where he is the Director of Creative Writing.

This Exquisite Loneliness was published by Viking in October 2023.