Sketch of a theory of loneliness
I grow old.....I grow old.....
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me
T.S. Eliot, from the Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock
Introduction - the Taboo against admitting to loneliness
Admitting to loneliness is mostly taboo. It is part of the general taboo, common to our society, of admitting to unhappiness. To be unhappy and to be lonely is to be a failure. It is also to be a potential burden - one may remind others of how they are also feeling, but trying to avoid. It is impossible to be in the company of a unhappy person for long without oneself feeling unhappy unless one cuts off from them, starts to regard them as different, sick perhaps. The function of the human signs of unhappiness is to evoke sympathy and support - but in our society people mostly do not know how to do this - or it is impossible to do this for reasons to be discussed in this paper. (Lonely and unhappy people know instinctively they will embarrass others who will not know how to respond - so tend to hide their feelings, putting a brave face on things). The support of unhappy people has become the function of specialists - therapists, counsellors, doctors and pill manufacturers.
Loneliness in mass society
Only in the last one hundred years (one and a third average lifetimes) have a substantial portion of humanity been living in towns and cities. This means that for the overwhelming portion of human evolution we have lived in small communities - communities in which everyone knew each other. In such communities if someone was lonely it was because they had been rejected by the community. Loneliness was not likely to involve anonymity. In our own society it can.
If it is only in the last one hundred years that a substantial minority (still not a majority) of the world live in cities, it is somewhat longer that human social organisation has been dominated by power structures based in them. Nevertheless, the first human civilisations evolved only about 6,000 years ago. That seems a long time until one remembers that there are perhaps four generations every century. In a thousands years there are therefore only about 40 generations and in 6,000 years only about 240. In history (or herstory) this seems a long time. However as a proportion of the length of time in which the human species has been evolving it is not.
If we examine the behaviour of any animal species except civilised humans we will find that these species do not live by their intellects but by their feelings. To the extent that animals think we can assume that their thinking is a calculation of how best to respond to their feelings. These feelings are hunger motivating food gathering and eating;, thirst motivating the search for water; fear - a self preserving instinct that drives them away from danger; a desire to find affection through mating; the compassionate feeding and protection of their young and so on.
There is no reason to assume that the human species evolved any differently. Indeed the anthropological evidence of surviving stone age cultures suggests that the human species has also evolved so that all our feelings have a real function. That includes anger, hate, sadness and despair. Anger derives from the energy we sometimes need to protect ourselves. If expressed in an equalitarian social framework it is a danger signal that things are very wrong. It makes people back off. Hate derives from a similar source - it may be what we need to keep ourselves alive in conditions of oppression. Despair is what we need when we have exhausted all avenues in the pursuit of purposes that have come to nothing. Despair is what makes us give up. It's dual function is to make us cry out for the support of others and force us to abandon our illusions.(The pursuit of goals that are futile and unobtainable). By abandoning our illusions we can start again - on a different path, perhaps with the compassionate support of those who have noticed our distress and who understand its roots.
In her book the Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff, who lived with the Yeaquana Indians describes how grown adults would wail in pain and distress in the arms of others without this being seen as a source of shame in their tribe. In this stone age society despair has not lost its expressive function.By expressing despair, support and comfort becomes available from others. Others are touched by the expression of pain. It strikes a chord of empathy in themselves and they do what they can to help. In our own time this is rare.
Civilisation, with its social hierarchies, meant a changed relationship to the emotions
With the emergence of social hierarchies and social authority the original function of human emotions were radically changed. Individuals or institutions with social authority cannot tolerate the anger of their subordinates against them for that is tantamount to accepting the right of subordinates to challenge their authority. Authority is protected often by violence, by armed forces that must obey orders. Fear cannot be accepted as a valid reasons for running away. Sadness and despair are no longer seen as a reason for helping someone - these signs of distress are now taken as indications of weaknesses, of vulnerability, where strength is what is admired and aspired to. In the new emerging civilisations social order meant at best that the weak must be 'protected'. (The word that describes the attitude of the patriarch to women, the feudal lord to his serfs, the colonialists to subjected peoples). At worse the vulnerability of the weak is taken as evidence that they are inferiors who can be used and /or exterminated. This is nakedly evident in fascist ideology - an ideology for the overt persecution of minorities, a means of passing emotional stress 'downwards' against more vulnerable people, thus 'earthing' the social system (to use a metaphor from electricity). This works because mass distress does not challenge the power structures whose operation has caused the emotional strain.. In times of social stress showing weakness and despair is to set oneself up as a victim. People who feel despair therefore tend to hide themselves.
For these reasons the expression of despair loses its original social and interpersonal function - to evoke sympathetic feeling and, therefore, mutual aid. Only in the case of child rearing is fear, crying and distress seen as a reason for support, sympathy and comfort. (And frequently not in this case either. Children are told to grow up, to stop crying. Their fear and terror is ignored. They are prepared as early as possible for adult behaviour in which tears are a sign of weakness and to be avoided. It is not surprising, then, that as Melanie Klein reports, a phase akin to psychosis is common in childhood. Our culture ordinarily starts us off in life with a period of madness in which we disconnect from the original experience and use of our feelings, our emotions become re-programmed to match power and authority structures)
In this process despair not only loses its expressive function- (the expression of despair no longer gets us support, indeed it may get us the reverse) it may also be the case that despair may loses its function in making us give up. If our despair is due to us being forced to pursue the agendas of our masters we may not be able to give up. Permanent despair is therefore the feeling of slaves - the only alternative is to dream of liberation or to plan it, which in certain circumstances may mean almost certain death.
In contemporary society despair is often held at bay with hope - defined in dictionary as the combination of expectation and desire. Hope is illusory to the extent that expectations fail to match the real probabilities of realising our desires. This partly depends on how much power we have - or how much our desires match that which is convenient to those who have power. In my Concise Oxford Dictionary of 1964 to desire not only means to long for something. It has the more active sense of 'ask for; pray; entreat; command'. It will be noticed that the first three terms imply subordination to people or institutions who can grant (or refuse) that for which one longs. The fourth terms implies that the wish of a person with power is someone else's command.
If one's feelings are tangled in the power system despair may therefore be that which is felt when the illusion of hope is abandoned because it is realised that what one wishes for does not suit the agendas of the powerful and one does not have the power oneself to make it happen. (Where power is the availability of free energy sufficient to carry through an initiative to realise one's purposes).
But what on earth has this to do with loneliness? In early tribal societies people's matching emotional structures would draw them into interpersonal relations with each other. They would be unlikely to be loneliness. A complementary of sexual desires meant, for example, that people would pair, without power considerations coming into things....People's ability to provide each other with matching and compatible emotional responses would be against a backdrop of social equality. Although people differed, there would not be a radically different quantitative extent to which different relationships would be associated with material comfort, and security, and safety, with all the stimulation and opportunities that come with the possession of resources and power. However in our society there is this radical differentiation. As against the tendency of relationships to form on grounds of emotional compatibility, reflecting matching personalities, relationships also tend to be calculated and regarded on their power magnitude. In the centre point is the possession of purchasing power. For example, marriage as a relationship may start with a vow which pledges both parties to each other 'for richer for poorer' but that means only, when times are hard, that one makes doubly sure that the young man's prospects are secure before embarking on the marriage in the first place. I recently scanned the lonely hearts column in a local newspaper - I was ruled out of responding to one advert straight away. It required an income of 40k of prospective male partners.
This is only to argue that we live in a society in which to sustain what are considered desirable relationships one must have resources and power. If one does not have resources and power then loneliness is very likely to be one's lot. In the field of sexual relations this is as old as those socially cruel ordinary arrangements that we have come to dignify with the term 'civilisation'. It is very common in peasant societies not to be able to marry unless one has sufficient wealth. In other societies economic pressures make loneliness pandemic -e.g. for example through the enforced separation of labourers from their families in various migratory labour arrangements (and in Britain immigration laws that separate families).
Loneliness within relationships
Loneliness may be very intense within relationships. We need to make a distinction between loneliness and isolation. Loneliness is not merely isolation - it is not merely the absence of other people. Were it so it would be often be easy enough to solve. One could sit in pubs or go to other places where people meet. But it is entirely possible to sit in pubs, to be in the presence of others, to share their company and conversation and still feel lonely. Indeed it is possible to go to bed with someone and have sex and still feel lonely. This is because loneliness is not solved by the mere presence of others, nor even by mutual acts commonly defined as intimate . Loneliness is only solved by the presence of people or persons that share one's emotional responses. Loneliness is only resolved when one is with someone who knows what moves you, the structure of your feelings - a structure of feelings that they share. And since the function of emotion is to motivate, to move, one can only know and feel this in movement - i.e. in the partial pursuit of common agendas, in the pursuit of common goals. It is out of this co-operative endeavour that affection is generated. And loneliness is the word we give to describe the inner feelings when we are starved of affection. In this sense, for example, to meet people in a pub as a solution to loneliness may be doubly futile - for as a place of recreational drinking it is never the starting point of any common activity. Typically people retire to a pub after a meeting, after work or out of some other common social world with shared social purposes. If one is not a part of these common activities, perhaps because one cannot believe in them, then one is always, at most, an outsider.
The vicious circle of neediness
It is by understanding how affection is generated through shared experience and co-operative activity, in which people interact emotionally, that it is possible to go on to grasp, in turn, how the crude attempts of emotionally needy and lonely people to find affection are often self defeating. They frequently attempt to set up relationships to escape from their loneliness, using other people as a means to this end, rather than getting involved in shared activity and experience. If someone is identified as being at all interested in the lonely person, identified for a real reason, or of out of fantasy, as being a source of affection, then the lonely person may throw themselves in this persons direction. They may be always seeking the other person out, on the doorstep every evening, finding excuses to come round. The other person experiences this as a loss of control of their own need for privacy, a threat to their own ability to schedule their own time, an invasion of their ability to conduct their own lives. In the worst cases it is as if the other person should be totally available to them in the way parents are needed to be available to babies. ( This may be partly where the problem comes from originally - the fact that parents were not available in this way which leaves an unmet longing past the time the person should have grown out of it). Such a lonely person seems to be, or is, trying to use the other person as a means to an end - the end of loneliness, the hope for sex etc. But there is no reciprocity in these relationships, the other person is not getting much out of it, or nothing. Eventually, whatever real affection or pleasure was real in the relationship turns into a charitable holding back from expressing annoyance at being pestered. Later, this charitable friendliness may turn into anger and resentment. (Would be lovers instinctively recognise that this is a problem with their aspired for partners. After the first meeting that promises so much, despite their keeness to meet again, if they are sufficiently worldly wise they realise they must not appear to keen. To appear to keen would be off putting - because, I suspect, peole want to dispel the notion that they are going to be all over the other person in the sense of being dependent on them and giving them no independent space. The underlying idea here is correct for, as R.D.Laing put it, "Love is letting another person be, but with affection and concern".)
What is missing as the lonely person lunges towards friendship objects is the understanding that space is necessary to a healthy relationship. A healthy relationship is not just one where people are together it is where they have enough times apart, enough space between them. As real relationships evolve, and people change the amount of this time apart, the space must be flexible to people's changing - otherwise relationships becomes traps.
What is also important to good relationships is reciprocity - if both parties are not getting something out of it then the relationship is forced or charitable. Such relationships are not based on anything real like the pursuit of common goals. The relationship is not for anything - except resolving the isolation problems of the lonely party. When it therefore, inevitably breaks down the lonely person goes away bewildered and bitter, unclear how they will ever break out of their loneliness. They are seeing the solution to their problems as the acquisition of friends (like the acquisition of cars, carpets and stereos) whereas really the solution to their problems lies best of all in finding where they can get involved with others in convivial activity.
Convivial activity should, it is stressed, be seen as being a bit more than sharing purposes. Many men have their relationships sharing purposes (making money, pursuing political agendas etc.) which are instrumental rather than emotional. In these (usually work) activities people are subordinated to organisations and their purposes. Discussing these things in the pub passes for social activity. But discussing the technicalities of work or the outcome of the latest consumer adventure (as in the adverts) does not touch on the emotional level of shared purpose, mutual aid, that could be considered convivial.
What makes loneliness painful?
I am arguing then for seeing loneliness slightly differently from isolation - as the absence of affection arising out of co-operative activity. It may be thought of as the absence of positive stimulation and support from others in the pursuit of purposes that correspond to one's feelings. If we look more closely at the feelings associated with loneliness we will often find, I think, that it involves boredom and elements of sensory deprivation. I see boredom and sensory deprivation as closely related feelings. Where boredom arises out of repetition of experience it becomes not very different from the lack of new experience. That is why variety is the spice of life. Too much variety, it is true, can be exceedingly stressful if it leaves us floundering for new points of orientation and new responses in unfamiliar contexts. However, insufficient variety in our lives and our mental and emotional faculties are underused and this might be even more stressful.
We need a variety of stimulations - sensory and/or mental to keep ourselves healthy. If we take a person and put him or her in an artificial environment, deprived of all incoming sensory information then that person will begin to hallucinate. This is only to be expected. In everyday life our inner world, what we have learned, our memories as well as things we would rather not remember, all these structure the complex of our feelings, wants and fears. This inner world, in turn, effects our interpretations of our perceptions and forms a structure also of what we are able to perceive. With sensory deprivation we are confronted with this reality and only this inner reality. We only have our memories and our hopes an fears for the future. Put in another way when we lack stimulation we also lack the means of diversion, the means of forgetting our problems in activity which absorbs us.
There is not only a need, of course, for mental stimulation there is also a need for sensory stimulation. If we have not been too emotionally damaged in infancy tactile intimacy, cuddles and hugs reproduce the sense of security that we had then. They allow us to soften our muscles, to release tension - which is not only a mental state but a condition of the muscular system.
And, of course, if we are sexually lonely we are unable to find the stimulation and release that is intrinsic to our biologies - which nature has evolved in us not only as an inducement for reproductive behaviour but as a powerful complementary source of mutual pleasure, and therefore of bonding behaviour.
If there are such powerful reasons to bond, why then does it so often not take place? The earlier discussion of how our abilities to find relationships (sexual and non-sexual) is contaminated by power relationships is unfinished and not the whole story.
The disadvantages of relationships
In particular we need to look at the disadvantages of relationships. They can prevent the pursuit of personal agendas through the subordination of some people to other people. This can be deliberate, as in the stereotypical sexist relationship, where standard assumptions set limits on what activities women (and men) can do. As women have become more and more independent many have decided to pursue agendas and purposes in which relationships are, or may seem to hold, the potential danger, of scheduling stress. On other words staying in the relationship means that one has not the time to fit in all the things that one wants to do in one's life. Starting a relationship is particularly stressful where one is unfamiliar with the other person - as finding a common life style is likely to mean the negotiation and abandonment of large elements of a pre-existing life style. One moves into a realm of uncertainty that one cannot guarantee in advance that it will be really worth while overall. It is not surprising that so many relationships start at work - people are familiar with each other already, the calculation about the effect on one's lifestyle is easier to make.
Forming relationships not only changes the way one schedules one's time it may also challenge one's world view, one's habitual opinions and ways of understanding things. In wider relationship circles, in social networks, there are powerful tendencies to conformity in opinion and life style. Insofar as social networks are bound together by common activities and opinions one's ticket to membership is belief in those opinions and perhaps, participation in those activities. The fear of loneliness imposes conformity. On the other hand if, for whatever reason, one has developed one's own opinions, if one has become an 'outsider', one may come to value the independence that being on one's own brings, even as the emotional pain of loneliness, is sometimes overwhelming. By definition, pioneers in any field, those who are ahead of their time, have no one, or very few, with whom they can communicate across the range of their ideas - otherwise they would not be pioneers. Thoreau expressed the view of the outsider when he wrote: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, Maybe it is because he hears the sound of a different drummer, Let him keep pace with the beat he hears, However measured or far away".
We live in a society where relationships do not form easily in the ordinary course of social life. One must make a conscious effort, often, to form them. Special arrangements are made. The emergence of dating agencies, advertisements etc. is very interesting in what it says about the chance of people to get to know others on the emotional level in their everyday life. Clearly we live in a society where for many people such opportunities have disappeared. The decision to try form a relationships is an area in which judgements must be made as to whether it is likely to be worth while or not. Where people do not mix in circles that allow for getting to know other people it becomes very difficult for them or potential partners that they meet casually to assess and make judgements about compatibility. Sexual attraction may thus collapse into glances attached to faint hearted fantasies that are never followed up. The existence of an apparent wealth of relationship opportunities in urban areas may actually fail to materialise as real relationship formation. Too many alternatives interfere with each other. If one lived in a closed village community one would have a definite range of options for relationships based on people one knew, because one had grown up with or near them. A limitation of choice plus information simplifies. In urban settings pretty faces or handsome physiques are many and one knows nothing about them. The effect is paralying - if one forms relationships on the basis of calculation then one is for ever holding off an approach to A, on the off chance that it will interfere with one's chances with B. Meanwhile A, gets the picture that she is second choice and loses all interest. None of these problems would arise if one lived a life in which people formed convivial relationships with each other in their ordinary day to day activity. But this does not happen. The division of labour in our society means people work, or are active, in different places, doing different things. These activities are instrumental, not emotional. As people become more and more absorbed in instrumental relationships the only model they have for relationships is where other people are seen as means to ends. At work people are there to subordinate themselves to the aims of the organisation - relationships are sought like that, other people are required to be used in the pursuit of one's own agenda, not for the stimulation and excitement to be found in their different agenda, nor in the exploration of possible shared purposes. People are wanted so that they can be used. It is not surprising that while work is the place that most relationships are formed it is also the place where sexual harrassment so frequently takes place.
The physical environment and loneliness
It is my argument here that it is becoming increasingly difficult to actually make satisfactory relationships. In this respect the organisation of the physical environment - human environment patterning - is also relevant to the discussion of the causes of loneliness. It seems obvious that in early small scale communities, in villages of a few hundred people everyone would know everyone and would to some degree share lifestyles (but might work in different fields or in different village crafts as well as being divided between the powerful and powerless.) In modern society, the spatial organisation of social life is such that loneliness is partly created by the absence of regular natural meeting points, where, in the ordinary course of things, people would interact and get to know each other because, at those places, they shared common activities and concerns. Work fulfils this function as a place where many people form their relationships. But if their work life is widely separated from their accommodation, as is increasingly the case in the age of the automobile, then there is no reason why they should not be lonely at home, even if they can find companionship at work. Other focuses of human activity outside of work may be entirely absent - for example shopping in large, distant shopping centres or supermarkets may mean the decline in casual contact through a local corner shop. Much research suggests that people are, or were, most likely to form relationships with neighbours over the garden fence or in the street. Before the automobile streets were much more than places for cars to travel down - they were places people met for a chat, where children played, where promenades were held on summer evenings and people eyed each other up, where street parties and festivals might be held. All this has virtually disappeared. Research suggests that the number of friendships and acquaintances between neighbours and the amount of social interaction declines radically with the volume of traffic. And it may not be easy or possible to develop links between work and home life. Even in rural areas,. where villages have become dormitories, loneliness is now more likely than in previous eras - especially if one cannot afford to go to the village pub and rural public transport has withered away so that it is difficult to get to places where people meet.
Loneliness and childhood
Such processes, particularly urban design and traffic growth also reduce children's chances of roaming freely and meeting each other. In the past village children would grow up knowing each other. In the modern world, even if a neighbourhoods children know each other their chances of forming relationships for life in this way are slim. Outside of school they may have little contact. This may have lasting effects - children who have grown up on their own may find it difficult to break the ice in relationships. This is certainly the case with me.
Relationships on the move - a rootless society
Growing mobility means also that people move, with great regularity. In the USA I think I read that on average people move every two years or so. It thus becomes impossible for children (and adults) to form long term relationships - and those relationships that they have tend to be work related, and therefore instrumental, rather than emotional. The society itself thus becomes rootless. It is no wonder that the American archetype for a relationship is one formed on the road and that the car is a symbol for sexual success. It is the key to sexual relationships and is sold as such - without it one has no means of escape and no means to the shops. For those without income or cars there is loneliness, quiet desperation - or angry desperation, defiance, vandalism and car theft.
Once we begin to think about things in this kind of way it begins to be obvious why it should be virtually inevitable the large numbers of people should end up lonely and unable to form relationships. A lack of money and secure prospects for the future, the stress of forming relationships, the structures of city life all wreak havoc in people's emotional lives.
Relationship Skills - Difficulties in establishing and sustaining relationships
To these difficulties that arise in the economic, social and physical environment must be added the influence of what might be termed people's emotional skills. The use of the term skills I do not particularly like since it makes having relationships too much like work - it says something about the times in which we live. Perhaps it would be better to describe this as people's levels of emotional awareness. In this respect one will often find that people who have had mental health problems and who have then experienced therapy, or read books about therapeutic issues, are, paradoxically, far more aware of emotional dynamics than the supposedly healthy. This does not, however, mean that their lives are necessarily any happier. Indeed the contrary is likely to be the case. People who have been through emotionally incapacitating times, will often evolve better and better coping skills and greater and greater self awareness - but the problems that they have to cope with tend to grow more than disproportionately to their coping skills. Once they have had a breakdown then, to whatever problems may have caused their original breakdown, they are likely to have to cope in the future with many additional stresses. They are likely to find it difficult to get a job, accommodation and new relationships. Not for nothing do many people call themselves 'survivors' - for they have been through assault courses that plumb the fundamentals of human existence. They are often thus a lot more mature than those for whom life has been easy. The reason that such people still sometimes breakdown again is often that their burdens accumulate faster than their coping strategies. There are so many sources of stress that they rpeatedly come back to points of disintegration in their personal worlds where the even the best coping strategies will not hold one together. (In this respect the ministrations of psychiatrists and social workers are irrelevant. They have never been there - their salary levels cushion them). Needless to say, however, as one falls to pieces again, one again reduces one's chances of every being seen as a suitable friend or sexual partner.
In short, merely understanding the dynamics of human relationships and one's inner emotional life close up, merely being emotionally aware, does not solve the economic, social and spatial problems already referred to. These problems are magnified once one has a record. One can only start again from an inferior starting point. Users of mental health services say time and again that their main problems are getting accommodation and jobs but few mental health workers listen because they have no skills in providing these and cannot hear a message that would disempower them. They prefer to hand out medication or psychotherapy. In psychotherapy the assumption, in this respect is that one's emotional misery is something that has arisen out of personal inadequacy.
The limits of psychotherapy as a response to loneliness
Within the psychotherapy model, to be sure, this is an inadequacy that it is assumed can be worked on and resolved. The assumption within psychotherapy is that people's problems arise in their early emotional relationships and life experiences - these are assumed to have been damaging, or not adequate, so that people have evolved life strategies and ways of coping that are self-defeating. By becoming aware of these self defeating responses it then becomes possible, within the assumptions of psychotherapy, to live life differently. The principle assumption in this respect regard to the causes of loneliness and isolation is that people are reticent about revealing their feelings and needs to other people, they live defensively because their upbringings will have made them suspicious, paranoid, defensive. They close themselves off from relationships because their previous experience of relationships has been one in which they will have been used, abused, and their feelings overridden. In the therapy view these earlier experiences will have made people assume that negativity is a feature of all relationships, keeping their distance from other people. They may not be fully aware of this but therapy will help them remember how they evolved personal strategies in relationships which are no longer appropriate, if they ever were. In the therapy model the way is then opened up to other kinds of relationships.In these more healthy relationships they are not carrying over the sorrows, fears, unmet longings or angers from their past relationships into their new ones.
This is all very convincing but it only takes us so far - it fails to address all those social, economic and environmental causes of loneliness mentioned earlier. It also assumes that in society as a whole your average person is reasonably emotionally healthy - psychotherapy is seen as being to bring people up the level of everyone else, a level that is emotionally mature. The implicit idea of a general emotional maturity allows one to believe that people who have been through a curative process in therapy will now find acceptance by everyone else. Alas there are reasons to believe just the opposite. It is true, of course, that some people are more emotionally healthy than others - because they have had a more positive upbringing and also because they have endured hardship themselves and so have empathy. However it would be over simplistic to see mass psychology, the psychology of the population at large, as simply being healthy as against the unhealthy people who cannot cope or form relationships. In mass psychology lots of people are coping because they are using other people in an emotionally destructive way. In society as a whole unhappiness exists everywhere .The people who break down often do so because they have access to less of the respectable (or better hidden) addictions, defences and emotional displacement that everyone else has ( e.g. a weekly visit to buy more toys from Rumbelows; the purchase of cocaine; the opportunity of offloading of frustrations onto others through a job in managing them, treating them, social working them, policing them etc.; self distraction through workaholism; visits to a brothel etc.).
Psychotherapy is a powerfully attractive ideology because it does say real and relevant things about people's behaviour. It aids self understanding. It introduces people to a language with which they can begin to make sense of their past, it provides the words that people can use, perhaps for the first time, to understand their emotional life. But it has limits. Very often the people most in need of therapy are not society's emotional victims but the people whose power sets the context of the lives of these emotional victims.
In society as a whole virtually everyone has been made to feel small when they were small. In later life virtually all those who possess roles of social authority protect themselves against feeling small (powerless) again by feeling big in relation to someone else - their children, their pupils, their clients, those 'under their protection'. In this situation many individuals or social groups are regarded or treated as inferiors. This enables many people to maintain their mental balance. Self esteem can be found in regarding others as inferiors. These inferiors can be bullied - thus offloading feelings of anger and frustration. Such bullying can take a completely respectable form where it is done by professional as treatment or punishment or various forms of official help. As the psychiatrist drives away from work in the evening he feels responsible, adult, emotionally secure at having to force a disturbed patient to take a tranquilliser injection, or using his expertise on the ECT machine. These feelings are the reassurance that he really is grown up and has been sanctioned to take control over the life of another. These are the feelings that banish self doubt, the inferiority complex that would otherwise be felt, bequeathed by overbearing, interfering parents.
There are great limits to therapy as a cure for loneliness. The implication here is that the casusers of loneliness lie in the inadequate relationship skills of the lonely person. The limits lie in the assumption that therapy only or mainly applies to this sickness. Through therapy the sick can rejoin the company of the healthy. It ignores the fact that plenty of people are only appear well because they are making others sick - and the medical profession of psychiatry contains a good few examples. (This viewpoint has occasionally been acknowledged in the mental health services by brave critics. For example a psychoanalytical study has been done of ECT doctors which revealed high levels of hostility and hatred to their patients. This article, by David Abse and John Ewing, called Transference and Counter Transference in Somatic Therapies, in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, January 1956, includes the following kinds of comments from doctors, "Why don't we put him on the assembly line", "Hit him with all we've got")
To conclude, it would be wrong to assume that psychotherapy can cure loneliness except as part of a much broader process of social transformation that touches every aspect of life - and which touches and transforms the mental health services themselves, the ideology that they transmit socially, and the very personalities of their practitioners. Until this happens no one is ever going to be able to issue convincing certificates of emotional 'cure' that can function as useful references for potential sexual partners.(By writing convincing explanations for my own past emotional traumas and their context I try to do the best I can to write my own but......).
Medical psychiatry and loneliness
If psychotherapy has grave limits as a response to loneliness medical psychiatry is positively iatrogenic. Many of the supposed symptons of mental illness are easily understood as the result of loneliness and isolation. For example, one of the most common psychiatric symptoms, hearing voices, is probably most simply explained, as arising in the need for feedback, for friendships, for relationships, for someone with whom to share emotions, in times of stress. (This theme comes out clearly several times in the collection of writings in Hearing Voices edited by Marius Rome and Sandra Esher published by MIND in 1993. For example, it is very common for desperately lonely bereaved people to hear the voices of their loved ones.) Another common feature of madness is fantasy. But fantasy is an almost inevitable feature of isolation and loneliness. Loneliness generates powerful emotions and a desperate desire to communicate these strong feelings. At the same time there is no way for an isolated person to reality check how other people see or feel about him or her. The lonely person may indeed be being used a a moral leper, a scapegoat for emotional displacements in their family or some other social network. They have no way of judging the results of their desperate attempts to communicate with those from whom they are separated, who may have ostracised them. It is inevitable that this isolation and ostracisation will create fantasies of other people's responses to them because other people are not communicating. The hypothesis of other people's attitude to themslves that the desperately lonely person makes cannot be merely objective guesses. They are forced to think in hypotheses which are inevitably saturated with their hopes (for acceptance ) or fears (of their continued isolation, of dying unfulfilled, alone).
Within the medical model of mental health problems, one of the most pernicious and vicious effects of the medical theories which keep doctors in salaries, is that these entirely obvious things are falsely explained by reference to the allegedly different genetic and biological make up of people who are suffering in this way. They can do nothing about these problems other than to rely on these doctors for medication or voltage through the brain. Whereas psychotherapy, in principle, allows for the possibility of cure, the medical model even more reinforces loneliness as it undermines any possibility that people will be able to rebuild their economic or relationship futures. Within the medical model one is only ever 'in remission' - all attempts to start again are thus undermined in principle. The medical system therefore functions as a structure of parasitism that effectively renders impossible any chance of getting a second chance at employment, relationships or any valuable social role. Its principle means of intervention, medication, creates very noticeable disturbances of physical functioning, movement disorders, distant and slurred communication and facial expression that reduces possibilities for healthy emotional expression on the body level - we must remember that emotional expression occurs through facial expression, speech, body contact, making love etc. Many people think they know what the symptoms of mental illness are - when in fact they are witnessing the effects of drug use on people. In a sense they are right - mental illness is real. It exists as an iatrogenic (doctor caused) disease. The real mental illness is what doctors have created through their physical treatments of people who are suffering from incapacitating emotional distress caused, in reality, by a complex pattern of social, economic and environmental processes that impact on the inadequate coping strategies of individuals. (In the Third World, where the psychiatric system is less developed, and psychiatric drugs used less, non-normal states of mind and distress are repeated less recurrent - in the psychiatric jargon, relapses are less frequent most probably of all because psychiatry does not exist with all its iatrogenic effects).
One's only chance for sexual relationships, as I have found, is if one can convince potential lovers that the medical model is simply wrong and give them one's own, more credible account for one's past. Psychiatry as a system of ideas must be utterly smashed to clear the way forward for the emotional victims of our society to enter into ordinary relationships with everyone else. With the medical model as the prevailing ideology they stand no chance of starting again. Doctors cannot cure what are called mental health problems because their illness interpretation of the confusions which are created by severe distress compounds the problem. (For a different model of mental health problems which explains their seemingly bizarre features see my paper Madness and Its Causative Contexts in Changes, An International Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy, June 1994. This article was unfortunately written several years ago and does not contain some of the elements to be found here).
The Dynamics of Loneliness - the Hope/Despair Cycle
I have suggested already that the emotion corresponding to loneliness is despair. But this is too simple. The world is not divided into two rigidly demarcated categories - the relationship rich and the relationship poor. Rather there is a spectrum, a gradient from relationship rich to relationship poor. The relationship rich find it easier to form relationships, the relationship poor more difficult. This means that the chances of the relationship poor finding satisfying emotional relationships are that much the less. But I am writing about chances here, about statistical probabilities, not about absolute certainties. Where there is statistical probability there is possibility. Where there is possibility there is hope. Hope is defined as the combination of expectation and desire in my dictionary.
Two kinds of hope - high probability hope and low probability
To the the extent that probabilities are low to that extent hope is likely to be an illusion. To the extent that hope is an illusion it is likely to be disappointed. To the extent that disappointment occurs despair is likely to follow. Expressions of despair make one less attractive in the long term The psychological dynamics of loneliness may therefore look like this:
1. Where a person's economic, social, environmental and personal skills are such as to give them a good probability of forming a relationship loneliness will be understood by them as a mere temporary thing. They will hope that they will find new relationships and that hope will be based on a reasonable certainty. Their hope will thus not be illusory - it will not be a fantasy at least in the sense that people will always find hangers-on and bed partners. Loneliness does not take the more severe and very much more destructive form of isolation.
Very often what makes relationships relatively easy are things like money, power, status, fame etc. The kind of relationships thus formed may be very shallow as people do not come together out of any sense of deep experience, nor out of solidarity or mutual aid. There is, indeed, the likelihood that relationships will be based on using people (the usual way of gaining money and power). These relationships may thus be short lived. Their shallowness means that others are discarded like toys - this is the typical immaturity of the rich and powerful (David Smail deals with this in his books, for example, Taking Care, where he remarks one is unlikely to find a maturity among the heirs to fortunes and the powerful. The shallowness of these kinds of relationships means that loneliness is probably chronic within relationships and leads to a repeated pattern of throwing them away - as well as years attending the sort of psychobabble therapies generated in California - therapies that never touch on the crucial questions of wealth and power in emotional life.
2. For those who are relationship poor the situation is likely to be different. One possible dynamic is one where a person will make efforts to form relationships and then be rejected. The rejection will represent a painful disappointment. If this painful disappointment makes them miserable they will be unable to try again until a new source of hope arrives. If this hope is illusory again they may lapse into chronic hopelessness, which is . however, based on a realistic assessment of their situation. However, just their hopeless and despairing behaviour, in our society, marks them out as unattractive. No one comforts miserable people in our society. And no one chats them up either.
The apparent escape is hope based on illusion - but this is fantasy, thought disorder, itself a psychiatric sympton.
Befriending schemes in this context are acts of pity and charity - because the chances of reciprocity, of getting something back are limited. Indeed many of the traditional approaches to befriending do not work for reasons touched on earlier. On the surface it seems that people who go to drop ins have unsatisfactory relationships with one another because of their inadequate relationship skills - but that is because all drop ins do is provide a place for people to be together. Relationships really get going when people do things together - whether that is building bridges or making babies. As David Smail argues in Taking Care, many relationships never take off or simply fail because they have no function, there is nothing that they are actually for. Real relationships are happening only in so far as people are doing things together - in a co-operative and mutually assisting way if the relationship is positive - not because they are just together. In that sense mere sex, or even after a while bringing up children, is just not enough to hold people together.
In this sense loneliness is part and parcel of another problem - outside of work, shopping and leisure pursuits based on spending money, our society neither promotes nor encourages any other forms of common activity.
The end of loneliness and Holistic Development
Since the causes of loneliness are to be found in everything else - in economics, social structure, environment and psychological relations - the solution to the social and personal problems of loneliness must be found in those initiatives that seek to change our economic structure, social relations and environment. The solutions need to be situated also in a different culture of emotional relations - including sexual relations. There are urgent other reasons, like the ecological crisis, for changes in our ways of living together and a strategy for loneliness must fit into our arrangements for these. I hope that we can conclude that relationships are most likely to be formed most positively if they emerge in the activities of building projects and public activity for community, environmental and social goals that are positive. This is not an argument for earnest involvement in worthy community work - it is rather to argue that we must combine the solutions to the economic, social, environmental problems at the same time as removing psychological blocks on loneliness. In this respect there is an urgent need to redefine issues that are to do with the quality of life. People who have studied the planets economic and ecological problems have concluded that the high consumption life style is not sustainable. We need new ideas as to what makes life worth living and the questions asked here are part of that new way of looking at society that will provide the asnwers. We must find the means through projects and initiatives in the restructuring of our living spaces for social and environmental goals that challenge narrow minded money rationality. Not that we must see finding our friends and lovers through earnest activity - rather we must turn earnest activity, as Ivan Illich has put it, into occasions for conviviality, for festivals and pleasurable celebrations which break down the barriers between work and leisure between colleagues and friends and which seek to draw in excluded people into positive and healing social processes that follow..
Brian Davey
1st Draft - April 1994
University of the North Pole
B.Sc. General Life Skills. Part 1.
Love Affairs
Answer all questions Time Allowed: One Lifetime
Q. 1. Before going to bed with someone why is it sensible to spend time getting to know them?
Q.2. Answer (a) and (b)
(a) " Getting to know someone involves seeing if their life plans and daily interests are reasonably compatible with yours". Why is is this important in the early stages of any relationship?
(b) " Sexual foreplay is not only to arouse someone before intercourse but gives opportunities to get to know someone physically before you make a deeper commitment. If a person's foreplay is boring or non- existence they will be boring in bed". Comment on this idea with suggestions for some hot foreplay.
Q.3. Answer A, B or C.
A. "I knew hardly anything about my husband until we were married. When I look back I have to admit it never occurred to me to ask and I didn't know what to ask. I chose him because all my friends fancied him." Give examples how social networks can influence the formation and development of relationships.
B. "All my friends felt really uneasy about this guy and couldn't make him out at all. I picked up on this and left him alone." Give examples of how social networks can prevent relationships.
C. "I got really angry with my friends and so ended up with the man they all disliked. Later I wondered if I was repeating a pattern whereby I had gone out with the boy my mum didn't want me with. He was OK but he turned out not to be for me. " Give examples of how rivalries play a part in relationship formation.
Q. 4.. "I thought love was to be found by making myself a desirable acquisition in the relationship market and was looking for the acquisition of a desirable partner for myself. Then I had a breakdown which ruined my reputation and broke my self confidence. It took me years to realise Love was something you gave". Discuss.
Q. 5. "I was reeling from one relationship to another because I couldn't live without a relationship. I couldn't be on my own. So I never took the time to find the one I really wanted." Elaborate and explain how inadequate parenting can perpetuate dependency needs.
Q. 6. Answer (A) or (B)
A. "Taking your time to find the relationship that you want may mean rejecting people's advances and that is a special problem if the people rejected have self esteem problems . There is nothing that can be done about this". Comment.
B. "Rejection or acceptance is a process rather than an act or an event. One makes clear how close you want another person to be by how many times you look at them, how close you are to them, the expression on your face etc. This means that relationship paupers whose isolation makes them look miserable get caught in a vicious circle" Elaborate and explain.
Q. 7. Consider the following 2 statements "In order not to be nasty I tried to be nice about keeping him at a distance and he probably misinterpreted this as indecision on my part as whether I wanted him or not. Then he came on even stronger. It all ended up very nastily. " and " My indecision about whether to approach her or not was fueled by my fear of rejection so I approached her very halfheartedly. She was nice and I made the mistake of assuming that she had rejected me because I was so half hearted. My own indecision had made me mistakenly see her rejection also as indecision. I tried again and was horrified when she was really nasty" . Should heterosexual men, post feminism, wait for unambiguous come ons? What would be the consequences for women?
Q 8. Comment on the idea that many people are lonely not because of poor interpersonal skills but because there are no settings in their environment where they can regularly meet people informally and get to know them and/or they are too poor to get out and be an attractive catch.
Q. 9. In therapy he commented " I suddenly realised my mother's attitude was 'Don't you dare bring your problems and confusions home to me, you are supposed to be a credit to the family'. My elder sister bullied me and my father beat me when I showed pride at my first awareness of myself as a sexual being. It is no suprise I could not relate to the opposite sex". Comment on the psychological development of ' loners'.
Q. 10 The American psychiatrist H.S.Sullivan described love as a situation of collaboration in which two people "play according to the rules of the game to preserve our prestige and feeling of superiority and merit" This is described by Erich Fromm in the Art of Loving as a definition which reflects the experience of the twentieth century marketing personality. It is really a reflection of underlying social pathology arising in inequality and competition. What is your view?
Q. 11. No one is loved if they undermine other people's self esteem. People are frightened of and do not trust clever bastards because they can make you feel small". Explain why being too clever will not help you find love.
Q.12. "Falling in love is like any kind of falling. You are out of control and can get hurt"
(a) Give examples how another person can churn you up so much that your only choice seems to be to have a relationship with them to try bring your life back under control.
(b) Give examples to show how your vulnerability might then mean you get manipulated.
(c) Why is obsessively trying to work out what makes a mysterious stranger tick not the same as love.
Q. 13. "I thought I was in love because I could not get someone out of my mind because I did not understand them. This was very distracting from all the other things I had to do. It turned out to be a waste of my time because under the charming mysterious exterior was confusion and a desire to be mothered." Explain why infatuations are often disappointing.
Q. 14. Read the following passage and answer the question that follows it.
" I thought I would hang around until I suddenly saw myself as a fly in someones web. There were several other flies in the web and our function seemed to keep someone's ego pumped up. The more I struggled to be free the more wound up I became and the more trapped I felt. So then I thought. No, that's too paranoid. We are all here as an option collection, maybe to take up later, because this other person didn't really know what she doing. So then I felt: this is stupid, I'm just wasting my time and I bet if I walk away she'll come running after. She did too. So I concluded she wanted to stop me escaping. I told her it was sick to fancy someone who was walking away from them. I told her to see a therapist and that I'd see her in ten years for a drink maybe".
Give examples from your own life of the many different ways in which situations can be misinterpreted.
Q. 15. Since feelings generated in one relationship often occur with a time lag while you are with someone else, and since feelings cannot easily be switched off, if at all, why is is not a good idea to have triangular relationships? Why is it not a good idea to have a new relationships immediately after another one has come to an end?
Q 16. "Although I ended my relationship with John and started with Jack after a few weeks I found I was grieving for the things I had lost with John." Comment.
Q. 17. Why is pressuring someone to have a relationship futile? How might pressure occur?
Q. 18 "Love is not blind it is practical. If a love affair would create chaos in life practicalities it would create frustration, exhaustion and therefore emotional chaos too. Intimacy is only sustainable in an energy efficient (close proximity, low resistant, practical) relationship". Comment.
Q. 19. "Love is letting another person be, but with affection and concern." R.D. Laing. Comment.
Q.20. "Love relationships are usually embodied in joint domestic and sometimes joint employment relationships. If someone risks a triangular affair with someone else in these circumstances they may be undermining the foundations of their daily life. This is not at all wise." Discuss
Q21. "If they can have triangular relationships in Nepal, where several men can be partnered with a single woman, it can work in this country to". Comment on the idea that the only real problem with triangles and polyamorous relationships are your tutting tutting friends and what mother would say.
Q22. "Sharing your partner with someone else is ideal where you and the person want more space and freetime while your partner wants more intense emotional relating". Discuss.
Q. 23 Why should one never stay in a relationship only because you are afraid of hurting another person?
Q. 24. "We all need to depend on others sometimes but this is not the same as staying in a relationship to prop someone up - emotionally healthy grown ups do not need continued parenting or props to their self esteem". Comment.
Q. 25."Honest disinterest or even dislike is better than pretend affection because you know where you stand and can orientate yourself . That way you remain free." Comment.
Q. 26.. "There is no guarantee that you will be happy and no fail safe way of finding sexual love. You can only avoid ways of relating which are futile". Do you agree or disagree? Give your reasons and relate them to whether mum and dad gave you sweeties when you were "good" (=did what they wanted). Could this list of questions be added to for ever.
Q.27. "The threat of suicide in a relationship is the ultimate power move and act of revenge. It should be countered by telling the person they will be remembered with contempt rather than with feelings of guilt". Is this recommendation from psychotherapy equally applicable in a "love affair" that turned out to be an emotional prison?
Q.28. "A Theory of Love will never help you predict the actions of strangers to whom you feel attracted, only perhaps allow you to orientate yourself to what is happening when it happens. The chief feature of strangers is their unpredictability whereas one feature of love is knowing where you stand with someone." Elaborate.
Q. 29.. Explain how shopping thinking increasingly dominates relationships discussing: (a) Ocassions centred around gifts; (b) lovers perceived as objects to be acquired. Comment on how you would like your lover packaged on a beach and after the January sales. What does it say about your relationship?
Q 30. "If you do not have a car then your chances of finding a relationship are reduced. If you do manage to get a relationship your chances of sustaining it are also likely to be reduced." Discuss this statement in its status and convenience dimensions.
Q. 31. How might it help a love relationship if each partner has a room of their own?
Q. 32 "Nothing you do that pleases your lover is wrong if it does not risk your physical health, but some things can keep you stuck in old emotional hurts and ways of relating". Say if you agree or disagree and give your reasoning.
Q.33. "Love in the modern world is not only physical attraction and emotional compatibility it is matching empty spaces in diaries and enough geographical proximity. Without these rows about who is being selfish, and who is putting up with the most inconvenience in order to meet are inevitable and will strain or destroy the relationship". Discuss.
Q. 34 ."If freedom be an icy wind, then let it fucking blow. It is better to be alone than in a relationship for the sake of it." Comment and award yourself a box of organic chocolates made from cocoa grown without using pesticides and bought in a fair trade relationship.
© BRIAN DAVEY