LONELINESS
ART and ORGANISM
LONELINESS
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They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness
But it’s better than drinking alone.
(Billy Joel, “Piano Man“, Piano Man (1973).
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To Know and To be Known
are two hugely affecting needs … the first sign of their being unmet is loneliness
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Loneliness may be one of the most poignant and powerful and paradoxical of emotions–it strikes at the existential heart of one’s humanity and the realization of our essential selves.
Loneliness is paradoxical because it represents an imbalance in the normally balanced processes of individuation and socialization, We are highly motivated to pursue these processes–biological needs–which together play distinctive but indispensable parts in human development.
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. (Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception)
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Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. (Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections (1963), p.356.)
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Connecting to
- DEVELOPMENT
- INDIVIDUATION and SOCIALIZATION;
- KNOW THYSELF:
- SELF in the CLASSROOM
- BIOLOGICAL NEEDS
- COGNITION and the THEORY of MIND – is loneliness at the heart of existential angst?
- A&O post on Loneliness
- AO-needs-sociality-and-physiology-loneliness/
- READING – about loneliness as a social construct
