ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the interplay between Melanie Klein’s thinking on “loneliness” and D. W. Winnicott’s thinking on solitude as the “capacity to be alone”. The dialectic of loneliness and solitude, derived from the original writings of Klein and Winnicott, becomes a poignant developmental struggle in psychotherapy patients. “The capacity to be alone” became a core kernel of the Winnicottian manifesto. The chapter illustrates clinical examples how Klein’s focus on the conscious analysis of formerly unconscious paranoid and depressive fantasies is part of a developmental mourning process that promotes psychic integration through the re-owning of intrapsychic projections. It also illustrates how Winnicott’s focus on the internalisation of the other in the area of transitional space is a part of an overall “developmental mourning” process. As Winnicott covertly influenced Klein, Klein also perpetually influenced Winnicott, and this transformed a potentially paralysing polarisation between Winnicott and Klein into a dynamically evolving dialectic.
