Loneliness and Longing: Conscious and Unconscious Aspects

We all experience loneliness at some time in our lives and it often motivates people, consciously or otherwise, to enter treatment. Yet it is rarely explicitly addressed in psychoanalytic literature. Loneliness and Longing rectifies this oversight by thoroughly exploring this painful psychological state.

In this book contributors address the inner sense of loneliness – that is feeling alone even in the company of others – by drawing on different aspects of loneliness and longing. Topics covered include:

• loneliness in the consulting room
• the relationship between loneliness and love
• the effects of social networking and the internet
• how loneliness changes throughout the life-cycle
• healing the analyst’s loneliness.

Loneliness and Longing draws on both theory and practice to discuss ways to help people to understand and cope with this important emotional state, encouraging them to make loneliness and longing less pervasive in their lives. This will be ideal reading for analysts, psychotherapists, and related practitioners facing the challenges of loneliness in their consulting rooms.

Brent Willock is President of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, a Board member of the Toronto Child Psychoanalytic Program and a faculty member of the Institute for the Advancement of Self Psychology.

Lori C. Bohm is a Supervising Analyst, faculty member, and Director at the Center for Applied Psychoanalysis and Intensive Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program at the William Alanson White Institute.

Rebecca Coleman Curtis is a member of the faculty and Supervisor at William Alanson White Institute, Supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and Professor of Psychology at Adelphi University.