LONELINESS BEGETS LONELINESS
Loneliness is often discussed as a public health issue: can we treat it as a disease?
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Do you know what it’s like to be alone? Not just to be alone but to live a lonely existence? To have no circle of friends? Not even to have one friend?
Have you come home to an empty apartment or possibly being greeted by. your cat who only shows you affection in the hopes you will let her out? Maybe you’ve spent a Saturday night sitting in front of your TV endlessly scrolling through 300 channels of cable hoping to find a movie to watch while all your “friends’’ and colleagues are out having fun. Surely surviving the holiday season watching couples holding hands whilst they gaze at the Christmas lights or families Christmas shopping together has amped up your seasonal anxiety.
What is loneliness? Loneliness is one of the most powerful experiences in human psychology.
According to German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, “Real loneliness,” as she called it, isn’t what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard characterized as the “shut-upness” and solitariness of the civilized. Loneliness, she said, is the want of intimacy. She said loneliness is “ such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it.” Fromm-Reichmann continues, “ It is so frightening and uncanny in character that they [those who have once suffered loneliness] try to dissociate the memory of what it was like and even the fear of it.” Some people may disagree such as John Cacioppo.
Loneliness “is not synonymous with being alone, nor does being with others guarantee protection from feelings of loneliness,” writes John Cacioppo, social neuroscientist and leading psychologist on the subject. Loneliness isn’t about being alone, it’s about not feeling connected.
Whether you agree or not, Fromm-Reichmann has a point that, “people will do practically everything to avoid it [loneliness.]” Being afraid of being alone arguably drives more people to make…
