The Taming of Solitude

Separation Anxiety in Psychoanalysis

Jean-Michel Quinodoz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134874330
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2010 Sigourney Award!

Psychoanalysts would argue that at the root of anxiety about loneliness, which commonly brings people into analysis, lies anxiety about separation, unresolved since childhood.

When re-experienced in analysis, the painful awareness of solitude - the sense of being a separate person - can become a rich source of personal creativity. In The Taming of Solitude, Jean-Michel Quinodoz brings together the views of Freud, Klein, Hanna Segal, W.R.D. Fairbairn, D.W. Winnicott, Anna Freud, Margaret Mahler, Heinz Kohut, John Bowlby and others, presenting a comprehensive approach to the experience of loneliness, a universal phenomenon which can be observed in everyday life and in any therapeutic situation.

Written with clarity and insight, The Taming of Solitude will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and therapists.

PART ONE
Separation anxiety in psychoanalytic practice

1
Separation anxiety in transference phantasies

‘Si tu veux un ami, apprivoise-moi!’
‘If you want a friend, tame me!’

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, p. 69

The two faces of solitude

Solitude has two faces: it may be a deadly counsellor, or, if tamed, it may become a friend of infinite worth. Can solitude be tamed? Is it possible to turn it into a genuine means of communication with oneself and with others?

In this book, I wish to show how solitude can be lived and transformed through the psychoanalytic experience, and how a sometimes hostile and desperate feeling of loneliness can gradually develop into a solitude tamed, constituting a foundation of trust for communication with oneself and with others.

This transition takes place by way of what we psychoanalysts call the working through of separation anxieties and object-loss anxieties, a process in which the psychological development of each individual and, in a similar way, the progress of the psychoanalytic relationship are manifested. Separation anxiety, where excessive, is the tragic fear of finding oneself alone and abandoned—the fount of psychical pain and the affect of mourning, as Freud showed in 1926. As loneliness, solitude may turn into a deadly abyss: ‘Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé’ [‘For the want of just one being, the world is void of human life’] (A.de Lamartine, L’Isolement). Conversely, when tamed, separation anxiety becomes a vivifying force: the taming of solitude is a matter not of eliminating anxiety but of learning to confront it and to use it in order to place it in the service of life. Feeling alone then means becoming aware that one is oneself unique and that the other is also unique; one’s relationship with oneself and others now assumes infinite worth. This is how I understand the Little Prince when he says to the roses: ‘You are just the way my fox used to be. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand others. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in the world’ (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, p. 72).

In this introductory chapter I should like to place the feeling of loneliness and separation anxiety in a psychoanalytic context. This type of anxiety is a universal fact of everyday life and is reproduced in the relationship with the person of the analyst, fundamentally moulding the development of the transference. Separation anxiety does indeed possess the essential characteristics of the transferable phenomena with which psychoanalysis is concerned. Because it tends to be reproduced like an infantile experience in the present-day relationship with the psychoanalyst, and owing to its unconscious nature, the separation anxiety that arises between the analysand and the analyst can be identified, and this allows it to be interpreted and worked through.

Separation anxiety: a universal phenomenon

Considering separation in the context of an interpersonal relationship, normal separation anxiety corresponds to an individual’s painful sense of fear when an affective relationship with an important person in his¹ circle is threatened with interruption or is actually interrupted. The interruption may result from loss of the affective link (loss of love), or it may be due to the actual loss of the important person. We tend to use the word ‘separation’ for a temporary interruption and ‘loss’ if it is permanent. However, phantasies of separation tend to be confused with ones of loss, and separation is then experienced as a loss.

Separation anxiety is a universal phenomenon; indeed, it is such an intimate and familiar emotion that we almost have to make a special effort to realize that it is a concern which accompanies every instant of our everyday lives. We need only think of what we say when welcoming or parting from friends or relations: ‘I am so pleased to see you again, I thought you had disappeared, I was worried that I had had no more news of you…. Do not leave me alone….’

Through these words we express, in circumstances seemingly of the utmost triviality, a fundamental need for an affective relationship and at the same time a feeling of longing at the thought of parting from a loved one. Separation anxiety is therefore a reflection of the painful emotion—which is to a greater or lesser extent conscious—that accompanies the perception of the transience of human relations, of the existence of others and of our own existence. Yet it is at the same time a structuring emotion for the ego, because the perception of the pain of our solitude makes us aware, first of all, that we exist as a single and unique being with respect to others and, secondly, that those others are different from ourselves. In this way separation anxiety constitutes the foundation of our sense of identity as well as of our knowledge of the other—that ‘other’ whom we psychoanalysts are accustomed to call the ‘object’ in order to distinguish him or her from the ‘subject’.

How is separation anxiety manifested?

Separation anxiety is usually expressed in affective reactions in which we experience—and can describe—our feelings in relation to the person from whom we feel separated: for instance, the feeling of being abandoned and alone, sad or angry, frustrated or desperate. The affective reaction to separation may also take the form of any of a whole range of emotions, depending on the degree of anxiety. These reactions may be minor, such as worry or grief, or severe, involving major manifestations which may be mental (depression, delusion or suicide), functional-somatic (affecting the functions) or psychosomatic (giving rise to organ lesions). Separation anxiety is actually one of the most common proximate causes of pathological manifestations and is responsible in particular for many different forms of mental or bodily illnesses or accidents.

The capacity to contain anxiety–in particular, separation anxiety — varies from individual to individual; what is called ‘normality’ corresponds to a given person’s capacity to cope with and work through anxiety. However, this capacity may be exceeded and anxiety may arise for both external and internal reasons, these two factors being closely connected with each other, as we shall see later. From a different point of view, reactions to separation or object-loss may be regarded as in most cases having unconscious origins and meanings, outside the realm of the subject’s consciousness. We shall now consider this point.

Between the conscious and the unconscious

Let us now examine separation anxiety in terms of conscious or unconscious psychical phenomena—i.e. in accordance with Freud’s first topography (1915e).

As a general rule, where separation anxiety is relatively well tolerated, the anxious subject is substantially conscious that the separation concerns the relationship with a person in their circle whom they have cathected, and that their feelings—for example, sadness or abandonment—have to do with the conscious bonds of relationship with the cathected person. Every psychical reaction admittedly has a conscious and an unconscious component. However, unconscious mechanisms predominate if the anxiety is excessive: the subject then defends against the onset of anxiety by banishing it into his unconscious, either by way of defence mechanisms such as repression, displacement or other defences, or by disavowing the affects and splitting his own ego, when the anxiety is too intense, as we shall see later. These defence mechanisms against anxiety ultimately have the consequence that the subject suffering from separation no longer knows whom the suffering concerns, or even what he is feeling about the separation from or loss of the cathected object. For example, when the pain of separation is excessive, the subject may displace the feelings of sadness and abandonment and experience them in relation to someone other than the cathected person, without being aware that his sadness has been diverted from the person who is its actual source. Such displacements of feelings are often found to lie at the root of parapraxes.

These mechanisms of defence against the perception of anxiety— like the displacements or parapraxes I have just mentioned—are phenomena which substantially escape the subject’s consciousness. They take place at the level which Freud (1915e) called ‘unconscious’, to distinguish them from phenomena perceived at a conscious level. Although it is often relatively easy for an outside observer to establish causal links between separation and the many unconscious manifestations of this type of anxiety, this is not the case for the person concerned, who is unable to see any causal connection between phenomena which escape him, because they take place outside his field of consciousness—i.e. in the unconscious. Returning to the example of displacement mentioned above, the relevant person does not himself realize that he is directing his sadness or anger towards someone who is not the real object of these feelings.

Again, with regard to separation anxiety, we can make the same observation as Freud did with a large number of mental disorders, that when a person with symptoms connected with this type of anxiety ultimately becomes conscious of their unconscious psychical origins, this consciousness may, when re-lived in the transference relationship, help to resolve the symptoms. This is one of the fundamental principles of psychoanalytic work.

We can now draw a comparison between mourning and separation anxiety. In normal mourning, the sufferer is aware of the link between their sadness, for example, and the separation from or loss of the loved person, whereas in pathological mourning this link tends to be unconscious: the person suffering from the separation or loss does not know, if not whom he has lost, at least what he has lost (Freud 1917e [1915]). It will not be possible for the subject to embark on the mourning-work whereby his symptoms may be resolved until he has been able to become aware of the unconscious links binding him to the object, so that he can consciously detach himself from it. Because psychoanalytic investigation potentially allows unconscious phenomena to be worked through, it is particularly valuable when compared with other approaches to separation anxiety.

Freud, separation and object-loss

The individual’s fundamental unconscious reactions to separation and object-loss were described by Freud. Throughout his life, he enquired into the origins of this type of psychological reaction and the reasons for its diversity. What, he asked, gives rise only to pain? What tends to cause anxiety instead? What leads to pathological mourning? And, again, what is the nature of normal mourning? His answers are contained in two major contributions.

In ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1917e [1915]), Freud discovers that the reason for the depressive reaction to object-loss is that the subject has partly identified with the lost object and become confused with it, as a defence against the feeling of having lost it. With ‘Mourning and melancholia’, Freud begins to attribute more importance to the relations between the subject and both external and internal objects, while the concept of the object, as well as that of the ego, becomes more specific. Some years later, with his second topography—i.e. a different division of the mind into ego, superego and id (complementing the first topography, in which the mind was divided into conscious, preconscious and unconscious) —Freud was to see anxiety as an affect experienced by the ego, and to modify his previous views on the origin of anxiety. Starting with Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d), he ascribes anxiety to phantasies of fear of separation and object-loss. He regards anxiety as a state of psychical helplessness of the ego when confronted by a threat of danger—a danger which revives the state of psychical and biological helplessness experienced by the infant in the absence of its mother, a person loved and intensely desired. Freud thus makes the fear of separation into the very prototype of anxiety.

It took some time for these new views of Freud’s, according to which separation and object-loss were predominant in the causation of anxiety and defence mechanisms, to gain acceptance; indeed, some psychoanalysts still dispute them. One of the main stumbling blocks in my view has to do with the difficulty of determining the part played by phantasies as compared with reality in the matter of separation and object-loss. This is a fundamental point which we shall discuss right away; it will afford us a better understanding of the impact of the psychoanalytic approach to this problem, which lies at the crossroads between reality and phantasy—i.e. between external reality and psychical reality.

Reality and the phantasy of separation and object-loss

The problem of the relations between external reality and internal or psychical reality arises in particularly acute form in separation anxiety. This is presumably due to the way this term is usually defined, because separation from or the loss of a person immediately suggests a real separation or a real loss, so that the part played by phantasies—i.e. the subject’s unconscious wishes to cause the object to disappear—tends to be forgotten.

Now psychoanalysis teaches us that real experiences of separation are not to be regarded only as facts of concrete reality, but also that these events are always interpreted in terms of phantasies. Conversely, we may observe that our phantasies and our relations with the internal images of our objects have a direct influence on our relations with the real persons around us, through the constant two-way traffic of the mechanisms of projection and introjection.

The importance of phantasies as compared with reality in separation anxiety and object-loss has been rated very differently by different psychoanalysts. Some analysts’ interest in studying the consequences of real separations and losses has certainly lent more currency to the idea that separation is primarily a problem of the relation with external reality and that it is outside the specific field of psychoanalysis. This has been felt to be the case with Anna Freud, Spitz and Bowlby, whose work has concentrated on separation from real persons, in particular in children, and, in the transference relationship, separation from the real person of the psychoanalyst. Anna Freud, for instance, holds that experiences of separation from the psychoanalyst during the treatment reawaken the memory of actual childhood separations, which are re-lived in the transference (Sandler et al. 1980).

Although Freud in 1926 was explicitly taking account of the instincts—i.e. unconscious wishes to cause the object to disappear — and not only of reality when he ascribed a predominant role to separation in the causation of anxiety, the same charge of overemphasizing the role of reality has been levelled at him, in particular by French psychoanalysts such as Laplanche (1980). When Freud attempts to assign different meanings to separation according to the relevant phase of development, distinguishing the separation of birth, weaning and loss of faeces in the pre-genital stages, Laplanche thus considers that Freud is exclusively seeking a first real event as the source of anxiety. In my view, in referring to a ‘flattening of the Freudian doctrine’ on this point (1980:144), Laplanche goes too far in his criticism of certain ambiguities which are admittedly present in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. Like many psychoanalysts today, I personally believe that Freud was seeking in this new theory of anxiety to assign different meanings to phantasies of separation and object-loss—meanings which differ according to the predominant sensations and bodily and mental experiences of infantile development and which give rise to phantasies. Even if some of Freud’s formulations are tentative, for him it is ultimately need and instinct which account for the traumatic or dangerous character of separation or object-loss. This will be confirmed by the study of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety featuring later in this book.

For Melanie Klein, anxiety about separation and loss is primarily connected with aggressive phantasies of destruction of the object. In her view, the fear of disappearance of the object may be experienced in paranoid form—in which case the predominant anxiety is of being attacked by the bad object—or in depressive form—when the anxiety of losing the internalized good object takes precedence over the fear of attack by the bad object. Because Klein attached so much importance to the internal world and to phantasy, it may sometimes have been felt that she took little account of the influence of objects in the external world, but this is not so. Developing the earlier hypotheses of Abraham and Freud, she described in detail the instinctual and defensive conflicts which—in mania and melancholia, for example—give rise to anxieties of destruction and object-loss (relating to both internal and external objects). In my opinion, the Kleinian conception of the role of instincts and defences in phantasies of destruction of the object affords the psychoanalyst the means not only to achieve a better understanding of the complex relations between internal and external objects but also to interpret them more precisely and more appropriately in the transference relationship with the analysand.

The psychoa...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FOREWORD
• PART ONE: SEPARATION ANXIETY IN PSYCHOANALYTIC PRACTICE
• PART TWO: THE PLACE OF SEPARATION ANXIETY IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORIES
• PART THREE: TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS
• PART FOUR: THE TAMING OF SOLITUDE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY