Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott on being alone
There is one person in the history of psychology who often brings together people who have difficulty with psychoanalysis and those who value the contribution that psychoanalysis has made to our understanding of the human being. Regardless of background and schooling, most people tend to be in touching agreement about the profound contribution of the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott (1896-1971) to psychology. This probably has to do with the fact that many of his main ideas, groundbreaking in their time, are taken for granted as part of how we view human beings today.
Winnicott's main contribution was to shift the focus from the individual psyche of the child to the interaction between parent and child, to show how good enough parenting enabled the holding required to cultivate the child's play and the security needed to explore his world. He was a popular educator who wrote in an accessible way without making his ideas simplistic or dumbed down.
The article "The ability to be alone" from 1958 is included in the Swedish collection "The creative impulse" and touches on the question of how a person cultivates the ability to be alone. Winnicott writes:
My intention is to examine the individual's ability to be alone, and I start from the assumption that this ability is one of the most important criteria of emotional maturity. In almost all of our psychoanalytic treatments, there comes a time when the ability to be alone is essential for the patient. In clinical practice, this may manifest itself in a moment or an entire analytic hour of silence, and this silence, far from being a sign of resistance, turns out to be a sign of progress. Perhaps it is the first time that the patient has been able to be alone.
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It must be emphasized that what I am discussing here is not this actually being alone. A person can be in a solitary cell and still not have the capacity to be alone. What suffering that must entail is beyond imagination. On the other hand, there are many people who actually learn to appreciate loneliness before they leave childhood, and they may even regard loneliness as a very precious asset.
The point he makes is similar to the theory presented by Erich Fromm in terms of physical loneliness as opposed to moral loneliness. Winnicott believes that this ability is based on our early experiences in life:
Although there are many kinds of experiences that converge in the establishment of the capacity to be alone, there is one that is the very foundation and without which the capacity to be alone does not arise, namely the experience of being alone in the presence of the mother as an infant and young child. The basis of the capacity to be alone is thus a paradox: the experience of being alone while someone else is present.
The child thus needs to transform the mother from an external object to what Melanie Klein refers to as an internal object. Winnicott again:
The individual's relationship with his or her internal objects, together with the trust in these internal relationships, provides a security of life that is sufficient for him or her to remain calm and content for the time being, even in the absence of external objects and stimuli. Maturity and the ability to be alone presuppose that the individual has had the opportunity, through sufficiently good maternal care, to build up trust in the benevolence of the environment.
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Gradually, the self-supporting environment is introjected and built into the individual's personality, so that a capacity to actually be alone emerges. Theoretically, however, there is always someone present, someone who is ultimately and unconsciously equated with the mother, the person who, in the first days and weeks of life, identified with her child and at that time was not interested in anything other than caring for her child.
If this early experience is missing and the ability to be alone has not been formed, there is the possibility to train your ability to be alone in adulthood.
The basis of the ability to be alone is the experience of being alone in the presence of someone.
