1 Introduction
You are not alone
Rebecca Coleman Curtis
No man is an island.
John Donne
As I write these words, I find myself thinking of Tom Hanks all alone on an uninhabited island in Cast Away, his FedEx plane having crashed in a storm. He speaks to the volleyball that also washed ashore, calling it “Wilson.” For four years he spoke with and argued with Wilson until he constructed a raft and they sailed away. At one point Wilson becomes untethered, and although Tom, playing a character called Chuck, swims after him, he is unable to retrieve him. Returning to his raft, he breaks down in tears. I heard from someone else that everyone in his movie theater cried then, too. And to a lonely patient who had seen the film, I suggested that she talk to Wilson. She did, and this became a joke between us over time.
Many people on our planet speak to God. But religion is declining in the West these days (September 5, 2016, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk), so to whom do we speak? As a child I sang the song, “I come to the garden alone, when the dew is still on the roses. And he walks with me and he talks with me, and tells me I am his own.” Although I have plenty of people with whom to speak, this song is still with me as I walk out to my pond and talk to the anolis … and to the universe … and to you.
Gregory Walton and colleagues (Walton & Cohen, 2007) have shown that when people shift blame for negative events from “It’s just me” to “I’m not alone, and there are others going through it,” the 45-minute intervention in his research study leaves participants feeling happier, improves their health and leads to less activation of negative stereotypes. The intervention has a dramatic effect on achievement, especially for minority students and women. In the experiments, upper-class students at Stanford believed they were writing for freshmen about their own struggles and how they got through them.
Isolation, loneliness and low social status can harm a person’s subjective sense of well-being, as well as his or her intellectual achievement, immune function and health. Research shows that even a single instance of exclusion can undermine well-being (Bernstein & Claypool, 2012), IQ test performance and self-regulation (Baumeister, Twenge, & Nuss, 2002; DeWall, 2013; Stillman & Baumeister, 2013), although the effects can be complicated.
“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life,” stated Marina Keegan (2014, p. 1) in The Opposite of Loneliness. This was Marina’s final message to her college classmates, distributed in a special edition of the Yale Daily News at the 2012 Commencement exercises. After her death in a car accident five days after she graduated, her words of inspiration resounded around the globe to 1.4 million viewers in 98 countries.
Wondering why students on many college campuses were name-calling and engaging in other undesirable behaviors, Annie Murphy Paul, a psychology journalist, questioned whether a lack of discipline explained these students’ actions. What are these students really asking for? Why are they protesting? she asked (2015). Reflecting on her experiences at Yale and trying to understand what was going on elsewhere as well, she concluded that what these students really wanted was a “sense of belonging.”
There are other books on the topic of belonging from political, sociological and social psychological perspectives. In research psychology, there even exists a measure for “The Sense of Belonging” (Bavely, 1995). The subject is so important that there are also measures for social belonging, school belonging, group belonging, academic belonging, sport belonging, community belonging and belonging in the congregation! The current volume examines the topic—not from empirical research, however, but from experiences in psychoanalysis and from psychoanalysts’ own points of view. Writing about the process of assimilation experienced by immigrants, Boulanger (2004) previously criticized this as an impossible task, saying, “Assimilation is a construct belonging to a world of discrete categories and forced choices; you belong to one culture or another, you are an insider or an outsider, a member or an ‘other’” (p. 289). Two special issues of the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology were dedicated to the theme of one of their recent conferences, “Where do I feel at home? Belonging and Not Belonging.” The first of these special issues relates considerably to the Arab-Israeli socio-political-ethnic context of belonging, as their conference was held in Jerusalem. There are articles including topics such as the interplay between “house” and “home,” language, literature and of a single self belonging to two enemy cultures. The second issue has articles that are autobiographical narratives and articles dealing with the issue of bilingual patients with monolingual analysts, religion in psychoanalytic sessions, bullying, differences in appearance between parent and child, and being gay in a psychoanalytic community. They are all quite stimulating.
After such a feast you may worry that there is nothing left for psychoanalysts to address. Don’t despair! The articles briefly described above were written by psychoanalysts in the tradition of Heinz Kohut, whereas the chapters in the current volume are written by interpersonal-relational psychoanalysts whose theories derive more from the early ideas of Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, among others, and more recently from Stephen Mitchell, Jay Greenberg, Donnel Stern, Philip Bromberg, Lou Aron and Jessica Benjamin, among many (cf. Curtis, 2019; Willock, 2007).
The current volume is separated into six parts. In the first section are three chapters dealing with the timely topic of immigration. This is fitting, as most were based on presentations at a conference held in Halifax, a city that houses an immigration museum portraying many experiences of immigrants who arrived at that port, many getting on the railroad right across the street to populate remoter areas of Canada.
Alison Ross, after reflecting on the meaning of “home” in various literary works, describes her work with two immigrants: one who was traumatized in Russia but had never spoken about it, and another who become panicked at the thought of moving to another country without realizing how disturbing her move to the United States without knowing English had been as a child. Adoption can result in many issues if a person believes they were not wanted by their own parents. Ehud Avitzur writes about a patient who was adopted whom he saw after he himself immigrated to Canada. His own issues and those of the patient converged. This is also the case in the next chapter by Dayi Lian. An immigrant from China to the United States, she was conducting psychotherapy with many immigrants to the US from various countries. Sometimes her appearance helped her patients to feel a sense of safety; sometimes it led to devaluation.
Belonging and loneliness is the subject of the next three chapters. Emad El-Din Aysha attributes Islamic terrorism simply to the failure of the nation-state in the Arab world. But he states that the crisis of Isis is really a crisis of belonging. Citing Erich Fromm’s ideas about defenses against the insecurity of modernity, he states that the sheer brutality of the movement enables one to inflate oneself psychologically so that the “world outside becomes small in comparison.” Nina E. Cerfolio then attempts to understand the issue of terrorism, specifically in the case of Chechen nationals and the Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston bombing. Citing Hannah Arendt, she notes that loneliness and humiliation are often at the root of terrorism. The loneliness of the travelers in the film Lost in Translation is discussed by Arthur Caspary. These individuals manage to connect in a meaningful way after meeting in a Japanese bar. Many of us can relate to the sense of loneliness one feels in a foreign country where no one even speaks our language.
The next section is about groups, culture and the environment. The unity of a group of boys at a scout camp is the topic of the chapter by Robert Langan. The fictionalized interchange among the group provides for the triadic interplay of modes of being: “self as subject, self as object, and a self as an interbeing.” He does this in the context of Freud’s (1919/1961) experiential distinction between the heimlich and the unheimlich, the comfortably homey and the disconcertingly uncanny. Next, Zvi Yadin describes the early feelings of belonging in a kibbutz and how, with time and other changes, the atmosphere has regrettably, from his perspective, deteriorated. The original culture of “we” was reinforced by the common efforts to bring forth fruit from land that was often barren, as well as the fight for survival against attacks by neighboring Arab militias. Cultural and economic changes led to the slow erosion of the “we” as Israel transformed into a more capitalist and individualist society. This paper analyzes vignettes of modern Hebrew literature related to the kibbutz as it follows the transformation from members’ sense of belonging, with total commitment to the collective, to the privatization of their property and a radical shift in social and economic values, focusing on the psychological aspects of these changes. It is always difficult to part from a primary identity group or tribe, as Renée Cherow-O’Leary discusses in her chapter on an interfaith marriage, a practice becoming much more common for Jews, a group that she was born into. Her marriage to a Jewish man did not last, but she found herself welcomed into her second husband’s Catholic family. Joy Dryer discusses how couples can uncouple well and poorly. She includes relevant information from neuroscience regarding safety, attachment, and emotional regulation to support her ideas. Elizabeth Allured, a psychoanalyst in a private practice, documents her experiences getting involved in a climate change group that was willing to take on this issue and what they have done to try to make a difference. With her fervent interest in this topic, she felt rather isolated in the psychoanalytic community. Fortunately, she found others who shared her deep concerns and has been educating psychoanalysts and their readers ever since.
The following two chapters concern belonging and mindfulness. Robert Besner explores the relationship between Buddhism and psychoanalysis and how both practices intend to increase conscious awareness, with mindfulness therapies growing in popularity and leading people to expand their sense of belonging with others and the universe. Sara Weber in the next chapter describes the glee she experienced as a child writing her name and address, starting with her street, town, state, US, and eventually Earth and universe. Embedded in a Buddhist perspective, she explains that the Buddhist word shunyata is composed of shunya, which means “empty,” and ta, which means “belonging to,” although it frequently gets translated misleadingly as “emptiness.”
The next section concerns self-organization and how it relates to a sense of belonging. Mark Borg and Daniel Berry describe the sort of belonging and not belonging that can occur in groups and how it can lead to confusion about one’s identity. This chapter follows the experience of five psychoanalytic professionals who become involved serially in a project to write a book jointly—an experience that brought to light the themes of anxiety around closeness and trust, which were finally resolved through mutual exposure of vulnerability and a willingness to contain conflict rather than to act it out in ways that would have been destructive to their ongoing collaboration. The difficulties of a patient leading a pseudo-life are described by Laura Young. The patient had taken care of her mother instead of herself and later tried to belong in high school by behaving as someone she did not really feel was herself. In psychoanalysis she was becoming clearer about who she wished to be, but her continued use of marijuana, although less than previously, still often left her in a fog. Jenny Kahn Kaufmann then describes two patients: one who controls others by spilling—saying too much—the other who gave up her life for her narcissistic mother. With a mother who was inattentive, a patient struggled to find her place in the world and a sense of belonging by saying more than what was appropriate. The other became very private, had to hide, and felt terror about being seen. Kaufmann puts these cases into the context of a movement from belonging to a mother and belonging with a mother developmentally. She describes finding the courage to hold back in herself and not say everything that she wanted to—in spite of group pressures—as a developmental achievement.
The psychoanalytic process itself and its institutions are the subjects of the final part. Michelle Flax and Gail White describe the paradoxical position of psychoanalysts in terms of belonging in the patient’s life. They describe as an example a psychoanalyst attending the funeral of a patient. John O’Leary discusses the issue of class in psychoanalysis. Because most psychoanalysts are either middle or upper-middle class, the poor may have a defensive feeling with analysts. He discusses his feelings in one case where the patient was of low income, hording and stalking, and had experienced bed bugs. He discusses reasons why some analysts may not wish to work with the poor, even though his own institute has services for low-income people. He thinks the issue of class has been largely ignored in psychoanalysis.
Noting the partisan politics that occur within psychoanalytic institutes, the issue of some people belonging to their institute and others not can be as intense there as in the rest of social-political life. Brent Willock claims that the divisions within psychoanalysis are hampering it as a discipline and the intellectual functioning of its adherents. He argues for a comparative-integrative psychoanalysis. John Sloane discusses his decision to leave his psychoanalytic institute. He did not believe he was sufficiently respected and found himself more respected elsewhere. This was a very hard decision, but he felt liberated afterwards.
The groups to which we feel we most belong will probably always be of major concern for people. Today, at the same time as the prominence of identity politics, we have others who simply say that they are “citizens of the world.” Some humans are including more and more in their basic identity groups, with animals even being included for many. With these issues in mind, we invite you to read what some psychoanalysts have to say as they add their voices to the topic of belonging and not belonging.
As Chaundry (2019) noted in her book Haunting Paris, death doesn’t end our thirst for a human touch. As death beckons, we still long to belong with others.
References
Baumeister, R. F., Twenge, J. M., & Nuss, C. K. (2002). Effects of social exclusion on cognitive process: anticipated aloneness reduces intelligent thought. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 817–827.
Bavely, T. (1995). Sense of belonging scale. doi:10.1037/t03562-000. Retrieved October 28, 2019.
Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done to: an intersubjective view of thirdness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5–46.
Bernstein, M. J., & Claypool, H. M. (2012). Not all social exclusions are created equal: e...
