Solitude

If the individual is to produce a new response to a given situation, he must be capable of learning and also of storing what he has learned. Stenhouse’s second factor is the development of a central memory store in which items which are functionally related can be filed, and against which new experiences can be measured. We have already encountered Palombo’s idea that dreams may be concerned with the process of sorting and comparing new experiences with past experiences.

Stenhouse’s third factor is the development of some capacity to abstract or to generalize.

There must be an ability for seeing similarities and differences, if some memory items rather than others are to be selected to act as modifiers of present behaviour.11

This capacity is present to some degree in all animals capable of learning from experience, but is particularly highly developed in man.

The idea that intelligent behaviour is dependent upon not responding immediately to any given situation can also be linked with the phenomena of dreaming. In dreams we may picture ourselves travelling, walking, running, fighting, or, in any number of other ways, being physically active. Yet in reality dreamers show little movement other than rapid eye movements and a few twitches of their limbs. There is an inhibition of the motor centres of the brain at the same time that the cortex shows increased electrical activity. Experiments in cats have shown that, if the part of the brain responsible for inhibiting the motor centres is destroyed, the animal will act out its dreams by showing aggressive or playful behaviour even whilst asleep. The inhibition of motor activity which occurs in dreams can be seen as one way of delaying immediate responses so that some kind of sorting activity can occur in the brain.

A comparable inhibition of motor activity occurs when we are awake and engaged in thinking. Thinking can be regarded as a preliminary to action; a scanning of possibilities, a linking of concepts, a reviewing of possible strategies. Eventually, thinking results in some sort of physical action, even if this is no more energetic than pressing the keys of a typewriter. Whilst thinking is going on, this eventual action must be postponed. Many people find this postponement difficult, and engage in some kind of displacement activity whilst thinking, like walking up and down, smoking, or playing with a pencil. Thinking is predominantly a solitary activity, although others may be present when an individual is concentrating upon his own thoughts.

Another analogy to Winnicott’s concept of the capacity to be alone is prayer. Prayer goes far beyond merely asking for benefits for oneself or for others. Prayer can be a public act of worship; but the person who prays in private feels himself to be alone in the presence of God. This is another way of putting the individual in touch with his deepest feelings. In some religions, no response to prayer from any supernatural being is even expected. Prayer is undertaken, not with the intention of influencing a deity, nor with any hope of prayers being directly answered, but in order to produce a harmonious state of mind. Prayer and meditation facilitate integration by allowing time for previously unrelated thoughts and feelings to interact. Being able to get in touch with one’s deepest thoughts and feelings, and providing time for them to regroup themselves into new formations and combinations, are important aspects of the creative process, as well as a way of relieving tension and promoting mental health.

It appears, therefore, that some development of the capacity to be alone is necessary if the brain is to function at its best, and if the individual is to fulfil his highest potential. Human beings easily become alienated from their own deepest needs and feelings. Learning, thinking, innovation, and maintaining contact with one’s own inner world are all facilitated by solitude.

3 The Uses of Solitude

‘Dans le tumulte des hommes et des événements, la solitude était ma tentation. Maintenant, elle est mon amie. De quelle autre se contenter quand on a rencontré l’Histoire?’

Charles de Gaulle

The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required. After major alterations in circumstances, fundamental reappraisal of the significance and meaning of existence may be needed. In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.

One distressing change in circumstances which is almost universally experienced is bereavement; of spouse, child, parent, or sibling. Research has confirmed the common-sense supposition that coming to terms with bereavement takes time; and has also disclosed that the process of mourning may be hindered by the various defensive measures which human beings employ when they wish to avoid experiencing painful feelings.

Some of these measures are reinforced and hallowed by the distaste which the English upper and middle classes traditionally show for overt expression of emotion. The man who has just lost a dearly loved wife, but who nevertheless goes to the office as usual, makes no reference to his loss, and perhaps works longer hours than usual, tends to be admired. This is partly because we prize stoicism; and partly because the sufferer who says nothing about his feelings is saving his fellows embarrassment. Many people do not know what to say to a bereaved person. If such a one himself behaves as if nothing has happened, his friends may thankfully conclude that he does not want them to express sympathy.

Admiration for the courage which such a person is displaying is misplaced. Every psychotherapist will have had the experience of treating patients in whom mourning has been delayed and uncompleted because they had tried to deal with their loss by adopting a stiff upper lip or a mask of indifference. When the dead person is mentioned during the course of psychotherapy, the patient will sometimes exhibit uncontrollable grief, although the loss may have taken place some months or years previously.

Objective studies have demonstrated that widows who do not show emotion shortly after bereavement suffer from more physical and psychological symptoms during the subsequent month; remain disturbed for longer; and, thirteen months after their loss, are still showing more disturbance than those who were able to ‘break down’ during the first week.1

Many cultures provide for a period of mourning by preventing the bereaved person from going to work or engaging in ordinary activities. In the last chapter, mention was made of certain psychic processes, like incubation, which require long periods of time for their completion. Mourning is another example of a process which may be very prolonged indeed. In rural Greece, bereaved women mourn for a period of five years. During this time, the bereaved woman wears black, visits the grave of the deceased daily, and begins by conducting conversations with the departed. Often, the grave is personified: rather than talk of visiting or tending the grave, a woman will speak of visiting her husband or daughter. The rituals demanded have the effect of emphasizing the reality of the loss.

Many Greek villagers subscribe to what can be called an indigenous theory of catharsis. They recognize that in spite of the desirability of immersing oneself fully in the emotions of pain, grief, and sorrow, the ultimate goal of a woman in mourning is to rid herself of these emotions through their repeated expression.2

The end of mourning, the final acceptance of death, takes place after the body is exhumed. The bones of the dead person are then collected, placed in a metal box, and join the bones of other villagers in the local ossuary.

A new social reality is constructed which enables the bereaved to inhabit more fully a world in which the deceased plays no part … This process is brought about through a gradual reduction in the intensity of the emotions associated with death, through the formation of new social relationships with new significant others, and through the constant confrontation with the objective facts of death, climaxing in the exhumation of the bones of the deceased. The result of this process is as complete an acceptance of the final and irreversible nature of death as is possible.3

Following bereavement, orthodox Jews are expected to stay at home, apart from a daily visit to the synagogue, whilst others feed and care for them. Although Murray Parkes casts some doubt upon how effective Jewish customs may be in some families, my own limited experience suggests that partial segregation of the mourner and the prohibition of normal working activities is beneficial. Coming to terms with loss is a difficult, painful, and largely solitary process which may be delayed rather than aided by distractions. Any rituals which underline the fact that bereavement is a profoundly traumatic event are helpful. In Great Britain today, religion is in decline, and there are few guidelines to indicate what is expected of mourners. When conventional periods of mourning were decreed, and the state of the mourner proclaimed by the adoption of black clothes, it was probably easier for the bereaved person to make the adjustment needed.

Although the support and sympathy of relatives and friends is helpful to bereaved persons, coming to terms with the loss of a loved person who was very close to one can only partially be shared. The process is essentially private, because it is so much concerned with intimacies which were not, and could not be, shared with others when the deceased partner was alive. The work of mourning is, by its very nature, something which takes place in the watches of the night and in the solitary recesses of the individual mind.

Mourning is one example of a long drawn out mental process leading to an eventual change of attitude. Instead of regarding life as necessarily bound up with, or even constituted by, the existence of an intimate relationship with the deceased person, the mourner comes to see matters differently. The mourner may or may not form new, intimate ties; but whether he or she does so or not, the mourner usually comes to realize that the significance of life is not entirely constituted by personal relationships; that the life of a person without intimate relationships also has meaning.

Changes of attitude take time because our ways of thinking about life and ourselves so easily become habitual. In the early days of psycho-analysis, analysts were reluctant to take on patients who were in their fifties or older, because it was thought that the possibility of bringing about changes in attitude were slender. In subsequent years, it has been realized that even elderly people are capable of change and innovation. Some people find it hard to adapt to any kind of change in circumstances; but this rigidity is more a characteristic of the obsessional personality than it is of being old.

Whether in young or old, changes of attitude are facilitated by solitude and often by change of environment as well. This is because habitual attitudes and behaviour often receive reinforcement from external circumstances. To take a trivial example, anyone who has attempted to give up smoking comes to realize that the wish for a cigarette often depends upon cues from the environment which recur at intervals. Finishing a meal; sitting down to work at a familiar desk; reaching for a drink after work is over – such trivial reinforcing stimuli are well known to everyone who has struggled with the habit. This is why many people find it easier to give up smoking when they go on holiday. In an unfamiliar place, where one no longer does the same thing at the same time each day, cues from the environment either disappear or lose some of their significance.

Holidays arc escapes from the routine of ordinary day-to-day existence. When we feel in need of a holiday, we often refer to needing ‘a change’. Holidays and the capacity to change march hand in hand. The word ‘retreat’ carries similar overtones of meaning. Although retreat in the face of the enemy may precede defeat, it does not necessarily do so: reculer pour mieux sauter applies to a variety of mental and physical manoeuvres including sleep, rest, and recreation. The word ‘retreat’ itself may be used to indicate a period of time, and by extension a place, which is especially designed for religious meditation and quiet worship. The Retreat was the name given to one of the most famous British mental hospitals, founded in 1792 and still flourishing, in which the pioneer Samuel Tuke instituted a regime of tolerance, kindness, and minimum restraint By providing a safe ‘asylum’ from the harassments of the world, it was hoped that salutary change in the disturbed minds of the mentally ill would come about.

This, too, was the concept underlying the ‘rest cure’ for mental disturbances promoted by Silas Weir Mitchell, an American neurologist who practised during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Its twentieth-century successor was ‘continuous narcosis’, a technique of keeping patients asleep by means of drugs for twenty or more hours out of the twenty-four. As we have seen, drugs, by inhibiting REM sleep, tend to prevent sleep from knitting up ‘the ravell’d sleave of care’ as effectively as it does unaided, which may be one reason why this treatment is no longer in use.

Both the ‘rest cure’ and continuous narcosis involved removal from relatives and partial isolation. Today, the fact that isolation can be therapeutic is seldom mentioned in textbooks of psychiatry. The emphasis is upon group participation, ‘milieu therapy’, ward meetings, staff-patient interaction, occupational therapy, art therapy, and every other means which can be devised of keeping the mentally ill constantly occupied and in contact with one another as well as with doctors and nurses. In the case of schizophrenic patients, who are too easily inclined to lose contact with the external world altogether, this ceaseless activity is probably beneficial. I am less persuaded of its value in depressed patients; and regret that the average mental hospital can make little provision for those patients who want to be alone and who would benefit from being so.

That solitude promotes insight as well as change has been recognized by great religious leaders, who have usually retreated from the world before returning to it to share what has been revealed to them. Although accounts vary, the enlightenment which finally came to the Buddha whilst he was meditating beneath a tree on the banks of the Nairanjana river is said to have been the culmination of long reflection upon the human condition. Jesus, according to both St Matthew and St Luke, spent forty days in the wilderness undergoing temptation by the devil before returning to proclaim his message of repentance and salvation. Mahomet, during the month of Ramadan, each year withdrew himself from the world to the cave of Hera. St Catherine of Siena spent three years in seclusion in her little room in the Via Benincasa during which she underwent a series of mystical experiences before entering upon an active life of teaching and preaching.

Contemporary Western culture makes the peace of solitude difficult to attain. The telephone is an ever-present threat to privacy. In cities, it is impossible to get away from the noise of motor traffic, aircraft, or railways. This, of course, is not a new problem. City streets, before the invention of the automobile, may, intermittently, have been even noisier than our own. The iron-bound wheels of carts travelling over cobbles make more noise than rubber tyres on asphalt. But the general continuous level of noise in cities is constantly increasing, despite the attempts of legislation to curb it.

Indeed, noise is so ubiquitous that many people evidently feel uncomfortable in its absence. Hence, the menace of ‘Muzak’ has invaded shops, hotels, aircraft, and even elevators. Some car drivers describe driving as relaxing, simply because they are alone and temporarily unavailable to others. But the popularity of car radios and cassette players attests the widespread desire for constant auditory input; and the invention of the car telephone has ensured that drivers who install it are never out of touch with those who want to talk to them. In the next chapter, we shall look at some aspects of ‘sensory deprivation’. As noise abatement enthusiasts have discovered, its opposite, sensory overload, is a largely disregarded problem. The current popularity of techniques like ‘transcendental meditation’ may represent an attempt to counterbalance the absence of silence and solitude which the modern urban environment inflicts upon us.

Removing oneself voluntarily from one’s habitual environment promotes self-understanding and contact with those inner depths of being which elude one in the hurly-burly of day-to-day life. In the ordinary way, our sense of identity depends upon interaction both with the physical world and with other people. My study, lined with books, reflects my interests, confirms my identity as a writer, and reinforces my sense of what kind of person I consider myself to be. My relationships with my family, with colleagues, friends, and less intimate acquaintances, define me as a person who holds certain views and who may be expected to behave in ways which are predictable.

But I may come to feel that such habitually defining factors are also limiting. Suppose that I become dissatisfied with my habitual self, or feel that there are areas of experience or self-understanding which I cannot reach. One way of exploring these is to remove myself from present surroundings and see what emerges. This is not without its dangers. Any form of new organization or integration within the mind has to be preceded by some degree of disorganization. No one can tell, until he has experienced it, whether or not this necessary disruption of former patterns will be succeeded by something better.

The desire for solitude as a means of escape from the pressure of ordinary life and as a way of renewal is vividly illustrated by Admiral Byrd’s account of manning an advanced weather base in the Antarctic during the winter of 1934. He insisted on doing this alone. He admits that his desire for this experience was not primarily the wish to make meteorological observations, although these constituted the ostensible reason for his solitary vigil.

Aside from the meteorological and auroral work, I had no important purposes. There was nothing of that sort. Nothing whatever, except one man’s desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste peace and quiet and solitude long enough to find out how good they really are.4

Byrd was not escaping from personal unhappiness. He describes himself as having an extraordinarily happy private life. Nevertheless, the pressures of organizing a variety of expeditions during the previous fourteen years, combined with anxiety about raising money for them and the inevitable publicity which surrounded his achievements, induced what he called ‘a crowding confusion’. He reached a point at which his life appeared to him aimless. He felt that he had no time to read the books he wanted to read; no time to listen to the music he wanted to hear.

I wanted something more than just privacy in the geographical sense. I wanted to sink roots into some replenishing philosophy.5

He also admits that he wanted to test his powers of endurance in an existence more rigorous than anything he had yet experienced. His hopes for finding a new meaning in life were realized. In his diary for 14 April, he records:

Took my daily walk at 4 p.m. today in 89° of frost … I paused to listen to the silence … The day was dying, the night being born – but with great peace. Here were imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence – a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps.

It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man’s oneness with the universe. The conviction came that that rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance – that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental off-shoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man’s despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night.6

On another occasion, he refers to feeling ‘more alive’ than at any other time in his life. Unfortunately, Byrd became ill, poisoned by the fumes of a faulty stove. The latter part of his account is largely concerned with his fight against physical weakness rather than with his oceanic, mystical experience. But in spite of the nearly fatal outcome of his experience, Byrd, four years after his ordeal was over, was able to write:

I did take away something that I had not fully possessed before: appreciation of the sheer beauty and miracle of being alive, and a humble set of values … Civilization has not altered my ideas. I live more simply now, and with more peace.7

What Byrd is describing is a mystical experience of unity with the universe which is familiar to those who have read similar accounts furnished by religious adepts. As William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience,

This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness.8

In his paper Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud refers to the correspondence which he had with Romain Rolland, to whom he had sent his book dismissing religion, The Future of an Illusion. Rolland complained that Freud had not understood the true source of religious sentiments, which Rolland affirmed to be ‘a sensation of “eternity”, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, “oceanic” Freud states that he can find no trace of any such feeling in himself. He goes on to say that what Rolland was describing was ‘a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole’.9

Freud proceeds to compare this feeling with the height of being in love, in which a man may feel that he is one with his beloved. As might be expected, Freud regards the oceanic feeling as a regression to an earlier state: that of the infant at the breast, at a period before the infant has learned to distinguish his ego from the external world. According to Freud, this is a gradual process.

He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which he will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time – among them what he desires most of all, his mother’s breast – and only reappear as a result of his screaming for help. In this way, there is for the first time set over against the ego an ‘object’, in the form of something which exists ‘outside’ and which is only forced to appear by a special action.10

Freud is not impressed with Rolland’s claim that the oceanic feeling is the source of religious sentiments. Freud claimed that man’s need for religion originated with the infant’s sense of helplessness: ‘I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.’11 However, he admits that the oceanic feeling may have become connected with religion at a later stage, and surmises that ‘oneness with the universe’ is

a first attempt at a religious consolation, as though it were another way of disclaiming the danger which the ego recognizes as threatening it from the external world.12

Although we are all subject to self-deception and to a variety of wish-fulfilling illusions, Freud’s account of the oceanic feeling and its meaning is less than satisfactory. It seems a more important experience than he admits. Defensive strategies and escapist wish-fulfilments generally appear superficial and partially inauthentic even to those who are employing them. But those who have experienced the states of mind recorded by Byrd and by William James record them as having had a permanent effect upon their perception of themselves and of the world; as being the profoundest moments of their existence. This is true both of those who have felt the sense of unity with the universe and of those who have felt the sense of unity with a beloved person.