Perspectives - Vol. 4, No. 4 - Sketch of a Theory of Loneliness - Page 1 of 3

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, here 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.

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