ABSTRACT
Taming solitude One of the aims of analysis is for the analysand to discover or rediscover in himself feelings which excessive anxiety about separation and object-loss may have prevented him from acquiring or caused him to lose: the feeling of autonomy and psychical freedom, internal strength and continuity, trust in himself and other people, and the capacity to love and be lovedin a word, a whole complex of feelings which characterizes what we call psychical maturity, summed up so aptly by Winnicott (1958) as the acquisition of a capacity to be ‘alone in the presence of someone’ (p. 32). For Winnicott, there are two forms of solitude during the course of development, a primitive form at an immature stage and a more elaborate form:
Being alone in the presence of someone can take place at a very early stage, when the ego immaturity is naturally balanced by ego-support from the mother. In the course of time the individual introjects the ego-supportive mother and
in this way becomes able to be alone without frequent reference to the mother or mother symbol
(1958:32)
Contrasting with feelings of anxiety, this capacity to experience solitude as a replenishment of one’s wellsprings, in relation to oneself and to other people, appears when the presence of the absent object is internalized. This progressive process of internalization is the specific result of the working through of repeated experiences of separations followed by reunions. During the course of infantile development, as in the psychoanalytic process, successive separations from the important person constantly rekindle the fear that the loss of the good object in external reality might also cause the internal good objects to be lost. The threat of this loss re-awakens the characteristic anxieties of the infantile depressive position, according to Melanie Klein, with the accompanying affects of sadness and mourning for the external and internal objects. Only positive experiences are capable of offsetting these internal beliefs that the object is lost as a result of phantasies of destruction. During the psychoanalytic process, the succession of experiences of separation followed by reunions gives rise to a work of mourning which will be overcome by means of reality testing, confirming that the destructive phantasies have not come true and reinforcing trust in good internal and external objects. The setting up of a good object within the ego then bears witness to the acquisition of an ‘ego strength’ that has become sufficient to tolerate the absence of the object without excessive anxiety, thereby subsequently allowing the sadness at the inevitable losses encountered in external reality to be overcome.
