The Anatomy of Loneliness

Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan

Chikako Ozawa-de Silva

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520383500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Loneliness is everybody's business. Neither a pathology nor a rare affliction, it is part of the human condition. Severe and chronic loneliness, however, is a threat to individual and public health and appears to be on the rise. In this illuminating book, anthropologist Chikako Ozawa-de Silva examines loneliness in Japan, focusing on rising rates of suicide, the commodification of intimacy, and problems impacting youth. Moving from interviews with college students, to stories of isolation following the 2011 natural and nuclear disasters, to online discussions in suicide website chat rooms, Ozawa-de Silva points to how society itself can exacerbate experiences of loneliness. A critical work for our world, The Anatomy of Loneliness considers how to turn the tide of the "lonely society" and calls for a deeper understanding of empathy and subjective experience on both individual and systemic levels.

1 Subjectivity and Empathy

In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945–1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

—Capt. Gustave M. Gilbert, US Army psychologist (1950)

As we have seen, loneliness is not being alone; it is feeling alone. While exploring the experiences of loneliness that are presented in this book, I came to understand more clearly how loneliness is actually fundamentally connected to the nature of subjectivity itself. The purpose of this chapter is to outline some of the major theoretical arguments put forward in this book, particularly regarding the interrelated nature of subjectivity, empathy, and loneliness, and then explain what I understand to be their methodological consequences for the anthropological study of what I call “afflictions of subjectivity” such as loneliness.

Several notable theorists in sociology and anthropology have explored how subjectivity is structured by the interplay of internal and external processes, one of the most notable being Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu used the term habitus to explain how subjectivity—individually and collectively—comes to be shaped by social structures which it then operates to replicate and perpetuate. Habitus refers to the postures that an individual or group of people in a society come to hold both mentally and physically toward others and their environments—that is, their way of relating to and perceiving the world. He famously and somewhat cryptically defined habitus as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.”¹ Importantly, this quote suggests that these structures of subjectivity need not be consciously accessible.

What do these internal structures of subjectivity consist of? What is their inner architecture? Although subjectivity can and has been defined in a number of ways, for the purposes of my work I define subjectivity as “first-person experience and the internal structures of body and mind that shape experience.” Subjectivity is that a person experiences, what they experience, and how they experience it. As this may appear as abstract and vague as Bourdieu’s definition to some, I present here with greater specificity what I believe to be a few of the key internal structures of subjectivity and how each relates to affective states such as loneliness.

For clarity of presentation, these theoretical and methodological arguments, as well as the background literature supporting them, are collected in this chapter, and the ethnographic basis for these arguments follows in the subsequent chapters. As a result, these arguments and claims may appear to some to be insufficiently or only loosely substantiated at first. I hope that readers will judge whether the ethnographic data presented in subsequent chapters lend them further support. In the conclusion of the book, I return to these arguments and tie the threads together regarding what they reveal about loneliness and how I think they can support future research.

THE JANUS-FACED NATURE OF SUBJECTIVITY

The first and most fundamental structure of subjectivity is what I call the “Janus-faced nature of subjectivity,” referring to Janus, the Roman god of gates and transitions, who has two faces looking in opposite directions.² Put simply, subjectivity is a process of differentiation that establishes a divide—albeit a porous one—between what is “self” and what is “not-self,” or “other.” It establishes two sides that operate at one and the same time: subjectivity looks out and looks in. This liminal process results in the continual establishment of a membrane that stands at the threshold between two interdependent and mutually co-constituting sides. They are co-constituting, because to speak of self implies what is not-self, namely the environment and others, while to speak of something that is “other” implies “self.” It is a process, because it is ongoing and not static, and because what is constituted as “self” and “not-self” can shift across contexts and time. This process is itself what we call subjective experience or simply experience, since it contains and establishes the subject of experience and the objects or content of experience.

To understand this concept, it is helpful to take each side of this membrane on its own first before putting them together. The first side is the aspect of subjectivity that “looks out.” As human beings we are social animals who participate in a shared symbolic world with others. This “shared world” aspect of subjectivity means that our meaning making, our language, our concepts, our values and beliefs, our assumptions and attitudes, and the very way we experience our environment and ourselves are all co-created with others. Sharing a world is both essential to our ability to communicate and exist with others and foundational to our felt need for others, acceptance, and belonging, what developmental psychologist Philippe Rochat has called “our basic need to affiliate.”³ The fact that we share a world enables empathy, care, and compassion, but it also means that we experience pain when we are socially isolated, ostracized, bullied, disrespected, neglected, or marginalized. It is from a recognition of this structure of subjectivity that researchers argue that all subjectivity is intersubjectivity; that all experience is intersubjective; and that all meaning, language, and culture are social in nature. Seen from this perspective, to be a self is to be interdependent with others; one is and becomes a self in relation to others.

Yet this “looking out” has a twin side, “looking in.” This refers to the fact that we also experience ourselves as a “self” separate from others and from our environment. Phenomenologists since Edmund Husserl have noted that a fundamental structure of experience is that it is always oriented toward an object (the other), which is called intentionality, but that at the same time it is always experience “for me” and “to me.” This is because to be an experiencing subject presupposes non-self objects to experience as well as a self that experiences.⁴ In fact, this very differentiation of self from environment is what it means to have a self and to be an organism that seeks to survive. As neurologist Antonio Damasio points out, if organisms made no differentiation between themselves and their environments, they would not seek to survive, nor would they approach food and safety and flee danger.⁵ Viewed from this perspective, to be a self is to be separate from others; it is to be alone.

When an individual feels physical pain, for example by stubbing their toe, they will often signal that experience to others, through a vocalization, facial expression, or gesture. Others seeing that can experience empathy on the basis of the shared nature of experience and meaning making. In fact, they may wince, and neuroimaging studies suggest that they may experience similar, although not identical, neural activation, as if experiencing that pain themselves.⁶ This speaks to the shared nature of experience. At the same time, that same individual may be going through emotional pain that is undetectable and invisible to others. Even if they try to communicate that pain, others may fail to understand or empathize. The fact that we have uncommunicable experiences speaks to the private nature of experience.⁷

These two sides that are established in subjectivity appear contradictory, yet they form a basic and fundamental dynamic of subjective experience: that we exist interdependently and individually, that we both share a world and are alone, and that both are fundamental to the nature of experience itself. Indeed, they are two sides of the same membrane—hence the term Janus-faced. This two-sided nature also creates the essential conditions for loneliness. Loneliness exists in and as a result of this liminality, which is why it is not ancillary but a fundamental problem and condition of human experience.

SUBJECTIVITY ESTABLISHES THE SELF, SURVIVAL, AND AFFECT

The other structures of subjectivity explored here all derive from, and are implied within, this one basic structure of subjectivity as a process of differentiation, but for purposes of clarity, I elucidate each one in turn here. The second structure of subjectivity is its role in establishing the self. Subjectivity is the process that creates the self. It is interdependent not only because it arises through an interaction of organism and environment, but more fundamentally from the fact that it is this very process of differentiation that establishes the organism as something distinct from its environment. This distinction can be considered one of the most basic characteristics of selfhood.

This perspective can be seen as the opposite of what we might call the naïve perspective on selfhood, which is that it is the self’s existence that results in subjectivity and not the other way around. After all, the fact that we exist seems indubitable. But why do we exist—that is to say, why do we exist as beings that experience ourselves as something other than our environments? From what we know about the constitution of our brains and nervous systems, the establishment of ourselves as conscious and sentient beings that take our own existence for granted is the result of neural processes; thus, it is these processes that allow us to feel that give rise to our sense of existence and our sense of self. Instead of Descartes’s “I think therefore I am,” we might say, “I feel therefore I am” or “I feel therefore I think I am.” Experience establishes existence and precedes essence.

SUBJECTIVITY IS PLASTIC

As human beings with higher cognition, for us selfhood is something that can become much more elaborated than the mere capacity for sensation, and numerous anthropologists and cultural psychologists have noted the various ways in which selfhood can be shaped and the different construals of selfhood that may be promoted in different societies and cultures.⁸ Notably, for example, psychologists Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Markus have suggested that Japanese people favor interdependent construals of selfhood as compared to the independent construals favored in North American and European societies.⁹ As Kitayama notes, these variations are possible because of the plasticity or malleability of subjectivity and the dynamic manner through which subjectivity constitutes selfhood.¹⁰

Just as fundamentally, the processes of subjectivity can be altered in fundamental ways by violence and trauma, illnesses such as schizophrenia, and other experiences. Anthropologist Byron Good points out that cultural phenomenological approaches that treat experience as an invariant, neo-Kantian process may provide “a profoundly inadequate basis for a theory of subjectivity,” particularly as they tend to leave out such complex psychological experiences as well as the role that social, historical, and political processes play in the shaping of subjectivity.¹¹ Like the present work, Good sees a role for empathy to play in anthropological research on subjectivity, although he rightly cautions that empathy cannot be limited to attending solely to what is verbally communicated. In his excellent monograph Vita, which focuses on a single interlocutor, and in his coedited volume Subjectivity, anthropologist João Biehl shows that subjectivity is an ever ongoing and relational process whereby individuals wrestle to make sense out of murky, uncertain, and incommensurable circumstances, and therefore attending to such lived experience may require new approaches to ethnography, even including aesthetics.¹²

Once the self is established at this most basic level, survival becomes a meaningful concept. The establishment of a self as something distinct from an environment also establishes, as a necessary by-product, the idea of survival; namely, if the integrity of this self is not protected, it will merely become part of the environment again, through death and dissolution of its elements. Self implies survival, and survival implies movement toward those things that promote survival and away from those that threaten survival. From this develop the fundamental components of affect, which begin at the most basic level in the form of sensations. To survive, an organism has to be able to sense what promotes its welfare and what threatens it and react accordingly. For emotion researchers like Damasio, this basic constitution of the self as something that must survive drives the development of sensations in the nervous system, and then a fuller elaboration of emotional life in birds, mammals, and human beings. For many researchers on emotion in psychology and neuroscience, emotions are best understood as evolved mechanisms for survival.¹³ Thus, we can say that the third structure of subjectivity is its affective nature: subjectivity establishes affect, and affect—the ability to feel in ways that support survival—is fundamental to subjectivity.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND SOCIETY

The Janus-faced nature of subjectivity should help to elucidate what is meant by intersubjectivity, and this is the fourth structure of subjectivity explored here. Because subjectivity is the differentiation of self from others (other people and the environment), because its membrane is porous and has sides that look in and look out, and because we as human beings are social animals who depend on maternal care and on one another for survival, it is only natural that our subjectivity is not an independent entity but a process that is co-constituted by society and the subjectivities of others. As psychiatrist and anthropologist Laurence Kirmayer notes, “Experience itself is interpersonal and intersubjective in origin.”¹⁴

As human beings, our survival is not merely an individual matter. As with all other mammalian species and like all bird species, human offspring depend entirely on maternal care to be born into the world and to survive, a fact that is increasingly pointed to by primatologists, comparative psychologists, and others as an explanation for why we see commonly prosocial emotions such as empathy and gratitude and prosocial behaviors such as consolation, helping, and cooperation across mammalian and bird species.¹⁵ Offspring are not born to be self-sufficient, and human beings have an especially long development period before reaching maturity. At any point in this period of development, if support from caring others were withdrawn, the offspring would die. Even after reaching maturity, we humans continue to depend on countless others for our food, shelter, and other necessities of life. This means that just as survival depends on feeling and affect (the very condition of being sentient), so does human survival depend on social affect: feelings about ourselves and others, belonging, empathy, acceptance, trust, and intimacy, as well as the absence of these—social rejection, exclusion, and so on—which is feared because it is associated with threats to survival and possibly death. It should not be a surprise, therefore, that social rejection and exclusion typically result in extr...