Solitude

I have been a consistent admirer of Bowlby’s work since I first encountered it. Because of his insistence that psycho-analytic observations must be supported by objective stuthes, and because of his use of ethological concepts, he has done more than any other psycho-analyst to link psycho-analysis with science. But attachment theory, in my view, does less than justice to the importance of work, to the emotional significance of what goes on in the mind of the individual when he is alone, and, more especially, to the central place occupied by the imagination in those who are capable of creative achievement. Intimate attachments are a hub around which a person’s life revolves, not necessarily the hub.

2 The Capacity to be Alone

‘We must reserve a little back-shop, all our own, entirety free, wherein to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude.’

Montaigne

In infancy and early childhood, attachment to parents or to parent substitutes is essential if the child is to survive, and secure attachment probably necessary if it is to develop into an adult capable of making intimate relationships with other adults on equal terms. Although broken homes are deplorably common in Western society, parents who are concerned about their children’s well-being try to provide them with a stable, loving background which will promote secure attachment and the growth of self-confidence. In addition, most parents will try to ensure that their children have plenty of opportunity to encounter and to play with other children of the same age. In both sub-human primates and in human beings, secure attachment between mother and infant encourages exploratory behaviour. A child who is sure of his mother’s availability will generally want to explore his immediate environment, play with toys, and come into contact with whatever else may be in the room, including other children. There is some evidence to suggest that children as young as eighteen months old benefit from being allowed to mix with their peers. It is certain that interaction with children of the same age provides opportunities for learning social skills which are not provided by interaction between parents and child.

For example, rough-and-tumble play, which is important in learning how to handle aggression, is common between children of the same age, but rare between parent and child. Attitudes to sex are generally acquired from other children rather than learned from parents. The study of adults who complain of sexual difficulties often discloses that, as children, they were unusually isolated. Because they did not learn from other children that sexual curiosity and sexual impulses are universal, they grew up feeling themselves to be different from others; perhaps uniquely evil.

In Chapter 1, we saw that most adult human beings want both intimate relationships and the sense of belonging to a community. In childhood, secure attachment to parents or to parent-substitutes is vital; but relationships with other children also provide social experience of a kind which is irreplaceable.

There has been, and continues to be, a great deal of research on these two aspects of child development; but virtually no discussion of whether it is ever valuable for children to be alone. Yet if it is considered desirable to foster the growth of the child’s imaginative capacity, we should ensure that our children, when they are old enough to enjoy it, are given time and opportunity for solitude. Many creative adults have left accounts of childhood feelings of mystical union with Nature; peculiar states of awareness, or ‘Intimations of Immortality’, as Wordsworth called them. Such accounts are furnished by characters as diverse as Walt Whitman, Arthur Koesder, Edmund Gosse, A. L. Rowse and C. S. Lewis. We may be sure that such moments do not occur when playing football, but chiefly when the child is on its own. Bernard Berenson’s description is particularly telling. He refers to moments when he lost himself in ‘some instant of perfect harmony’.

In childhood and boyhood this ecstasy overtook me when I was happy out of doors. Was I five or six? Certainly not seven. It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember – I need not recall – that I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one.1

A. L. Rowse describes similar experiences when he was a schoolboy in Cornwall.

I could not know then it was an early taste of aesthetic sensation, a kind of revelation which has since become a secret touchstone of experience for me, an inner resource and consolation. Later on, though still a schoolboy – now removed downhill to the secondary school – when I read Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘Intimations of Immortality’, I realised that that was the experience he was writing about.2

Modern psychotherapists, including myself, have taken as their criterion of emotional maturity the capacity of the individual to make mature relationships on equal terms. With few exceptions, psychotherapists have omitted to consider the fact that the capacity to be alone is also an aspect of emotional maturity.

One such exception is the psycho-analyst, Donald Winnicott. In 1958, Winnicott published a paper on ‘The Capacity to be Alone’ which has become a psycho-analytic classic. Winnicott wrote:

It is probably true to say that in psycho-analytical literature more has been written on the fear of being alone or the wish to be alone than on the ability to be alone; also a considerable amount of work has been done on the withdrawn state, a defensive organization implying an expectation of persecution. It would seem to me that a discussion on the positive aspects of the capacity to be alone is overdue.3

In Chapter 1,1 referred to Bowlby’s work on the early attachment of the human infant to its mother, and to the sequence of protest, despair, and detachment, which habitually occurs when the infant’s mother is removed. In normal circumstances, if no disastrous severance of the bond between mother and infant has occurred, the child gradually becomes able to tolerate longer periods of maternal absence without anxiety. Bowlby believes that confidence in the availability of attachment figures is gradually built up during the years of immaturity; more particularly during the period from the age of six months to five years, when attachment behaviour is most readily elicited. However, sensitivity to the presence or absence of attachment figures continues until well into adolescence. Many middle-class English children who had experienced total security in early childhood have had their expectations rudely shattered when sent to boarding school at the age of seven or eight.

It is generally recognized that clinging behaviour is indicative of insecurity. The child who will not let the mother leave, even for short periods, is the child who has no confidence in her return. Conversely, the child who has developed trust in the availability of attachment figures is the child who can increasingly experience being left by such figures without anxiety. Thus, the capacity to be alone is one aspect of an inner security which has been built up over the early years. Although there are children who shun company and are pathologically isolated, that is, who are in the ‘withdrawn state’ referred to by Winnicott, a child who enjoys some measure of solitude should not be confused with such children. Some children who enjoy the solitary exercise of the imagination may develop creative potential.

Building up a sense of security can be seen as a process of conditioning. Repeated confirmation of the presence of attachment figures when needed conditions the child to favourable expectations of their future availability. Psycho-analysts usually refer to this process as introjecting a good object; meaning by this that the attachment figure has become part of the individual’s inner world, and therefore someone on whom he can rely even though the person concerned is not actually present. This may seem far-fetched, but most people can think of times at which they have said to themselves, ‘What would so-and-so do in this situation?’ They are then relying upon someone who, although not there in reality, has been incorporated into their imaginative world as someone to turn to in a dilemma.

Winnicott suggests that the capacity to be alone in adult life originates with the infant’s experience of being alone in the presence of the mother. He is postulating a state in which the infant’s immediate needs, for food, warmth, physical contact and so on, have been satisfied, so that there is no need for the infant to be looking to the mother for anything, nor any need for her to be concerned with providing anything. Winnicott writes:

I am trying to justify the paradox that the capacity to be alone is based on the experience of being alone in the presence of someone, and that without a sufficiency of this experience the capacity to be alone cannot develop.4

Winnicott goes on to make the extremely interesting suggestion that

It is only when alone (that is to say, in the presence of someone) that the infant can discover his personal life.5

Infants, because they are immature, need the support of another person if their sense of being ‘I’, that is, a separate person with a separate identity, is to develop. Winnicott conceives that this begins to happen when the infant is able to be in the relaxed state which is constituted by the experience of being alone in the presence of the mother. After being in this state for a while, the infant will begin to experience a sensation or impulse. Winnicott suggests that

In this setting the sensation or impulse will feel real and be truly a personal experience.

Winnicott contrasts this feeling of personal experience with what he calls

a false life built on reactions to external stimuli.6

Throughout most of his professional life, Winnicott was particularly preoccupied with whether an individual’s experience was authentic or inauthentic. Many of the patients whom he treated had, for one reason or another, learned as children to be over-compliant; that is, to live in ways which were expected of them, or which pleased others, or which were designed not to offend others. These are the patients who build up what Winnicott called a ‘false self’; that is, a self which is based upon compliance with the wishes of others, rather than being based upon the individual’s own true feelings and instinctive needs. Such an individual ultimately comes to feel that life is pointless and futile, because he is merely adapting to the world rather than experiencing it as a place in which his subjective needs can find fulfilment.

Although Winnicott’s suppositions about the subjective experiences of infants are impossible to prove, I find his conceptions illuminating. He is suggesting that the capacity to be alone originally depends upon what Bowlby would call secure attachment: that is, upon the child being able peacefully to be itself in the presence of the mother without anxiety about her possible departure, and without anxiety as to what may or may not be expected by her. As the secure child grows, it will no longer need the constant physical presence of the mother or other attachment figure, but will be able to be alone without anxiety for longer periods.

But Winnicott goes further. He suggests that the capacity to be alone, first in the presence of the mother, and then in her absence, is also related to the individual’s capacity to get in touch with, and make manifest, his own true inner feelings. It is only when the child has experienced a contented, relaxed sense of being alone with, and then without, the mother, that he can be sure of being able to discover what he really needs or wants, irrespective of what others may expect or try to foist upon him.

The capacity to be alone thus becomes linked with self-discovery and self-realization; with becoming aware of one’s deepest needs, feelings, and impulses.

Psycho-analysis is also concerned with putting the individual in touch with his or her deepest feelings. The technique employed could be described as encouraging the individual to be alone in the presence of the analyst. This analogy particularly applies to the procedures used in the early days of psycho-analysis, before the analysis of transference became of such central importance (see Chapter 1). The use of the couch not only encouraged relaxation but also precluded eye contact between analysand and analyst. This prevented the analysand from being too preoccupied with the reactions of the analyst to what he was saying, and thus made it easier for him to concentrate upon his own inner world.

Some analysts still believe that providing a secure milieu in which the patient can explore and express his most intimate thoughts and feelings is at least as important as any interpretations which they may offer. One analyst whom I knew personally illustrated this point with the story of a patient whom he saw three times per week over a period of a year. At every session, the patient lay down upon the couch and plunged straight into free association. At the end of the year, the man pronounced himself cured, and proffered his grateful thanks. The analyst declared that, during the whole of this period, he had offered no interpretations whatever. Even if this particular story is slightly exaggerated, the analogy with what Winnicott postulates as taking place between the secure infant and the mother is striking.

As we have seen, patients in analysis can be helped to form better relationships with other people in the outside world by working through and understanding their relationship with the analyst. When a person is encouraged to get in touch with and express his deepest feelings, in the secure knowledge that he will not be rejected, criticized, nor expected to be different, some kind of rearrangement or sorting-out process often occurs within the mind which brings with it a sense of peace; a sense that the depths of the well of truth have really been reached. This process, which in itself contributes to healing, is facilitated by the analyst’s providing a suitably secure milieu, but is not necessarily dependent upon the analyst’s interpretations. The story of the patient who said he was cured despite, or because of, the silence of the analyst can be seen to contain a strong element of truth. The process of healing, in such cases, is very like the healing which may occur as part of the creative process in solitude.

Integration also takes place in sleep. We are all alone when we are asleep, even though we may be sharing a bed with a loved person. When faced with a problem to which there is no obvious answer, conventional wisdom recommends ‘sleeping on it’, and conventional wisdom is right. Most people have had the experience of being unable to make up their minds when faced with a difficult decision, and of going to bed with the decision still not taken. On waking in the morning, they often find that the solution has become so obvious that they cannot understand why they could not perceive it on the previous night. Some kind of scanning and re-ordering process has taken place during sleep, although the exact nature of this process remains mysterious.

Another example of integration which requires time, solitude, and, preferably, a period of sleep, is the process of learning. Students find that they cannot easily retain or reproduce material which they have tried to commit to memory immediately before taking an examination. On the other hand, material which has been learned at an earlier stage and ‘slept on’, is much more easily recalled. Some kind of reverberation around neuronal circuits must be linking new material to old material, and committing new material to the long-term memory store.

Although we spend about a third of our lives asleep, the reasons why we need sleep are not fully understood. That we do need it is certain. As interrogators long ago realized, depriving prisoners of sleep is a relatively quick method of breaking them down. Although a few exceptional people can, without deterioration, survive without sleep for quite long periods, the majority of previously normal human beings exhibit psychotic symptoms like delusions and hallucinations after only a few days and nights without sleep. It is also worth noting that many episodes of mental illness are preceded by periods of insomnia.

The integrating function of sleep may be linked with dreaming. In 1952, Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that there were two kinds of sleep, which can be shown by recording the electrical activity of the brain during sleep to follow a regular cycle. As subjects relax and fall asleep, the fairly rapid electrical waves which are characteristic of the brain’s waking activity are replaced by slower, more ample waves. These slower waves are accompanied by slow, rolling eye movements which can easily be seen through the closed eyelids of the sleeper, and which are entirely involuntary. It is possible to record these eye movements at the same time as the brain waves. When people first go to sleep, they enter quite quickly a stage of deep sleep from which it is difficult to rouse them. After about thirty or forty minutes, they begin to sleep more lightly; the sleeper’s breathing becomes faster and more irregular; there are small twitches of his face and fingertips, and his eyes make rapid movements as if he was actually looking at something. This phase of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM sleep as it is now called, lasts about ten minutes. Then the subject returns to sleeping more deeply. The whole cycle lasts about ninety minutes. Someone who sleeps for seven and a half hours generally spends between one and a half and two hours in this lighter, REM phase of sleep.

A high proportion of people who are awakened during REM sleep recall a dream, whereas very few of those awakened during the deeper phases of sleep do so. In other words, it looks as if most people dream every night for short periods every ninety minutes or

Following the discovery of the two varieties of sleep, it became possible to prevent people from dreaming whilst still allowing them an adequate period of sleep. Early experiments in depriving subjects of REM sleep suggested that not allowing dreams to occur produced a variety of symptoms, but later experiments have not confirmed this finding. However, those deprived of dreaming show an increased proportion of REM sleep to deep sleep when dream deprivation is discontinued.

The same phenomenon has been observed in people taking barbiturates, amphetamines, or alcohol. When the drugs are stopped, a rebound phenomenon occurs. The subject shows an increase in REM sleep as if he were trying to make up for what had been missing. According to William C. Dement, schizophrenics in remission show a particular need for REM sleep. After only two nights of dream deprivation they showed an excessive REM rebound. When not in remission, that is, when experiencing overt symptoms of schizophrenia like hallucinations and delusions, or when exhibiting types of bizarre behaviour characteristic of the illness, schizophrenics do not show REM rebound after two nights of deprivation.7 If further experiments confirm that the overtly psychotic do not need dreams to the same extent as normal people, the old idea that schizophrenic illness is ‘dreaming whilst being awake’ becomes even more convincing. Conversely, although normal mortals do not become psychotic even if totally deprived of REM sleep, entering the mad world of dreams each night probably promotes mental health in ways we do not fully understand.

It seems clear that some kind of scanning or re-programming takes place in dreams which has a beneficial effect upon ordinary mental functioning. Dreaming seems to be biologically adaptive. Stanley Palombo suggests that dreams are concerned with matching past and present experience. He thinks that

the dream compares the representation of an emotionally significant event of the past with the representation of an emotionally significant aspect of the previous day’s experience.8

This information-processing function of the dream is concerned with allotting the new experience to the right slot in the permanent memory. Whether this model accounts for all dreams is dubious; but it goes some way to explaining why it is that in dreams, time is so often out of joint. If past and present are being compared, it is not surprising that, in the dream, they so often appear to be confused.

Another example of some kind of re-ordering process taking place in the brain can be discerned in the stage of the creative process which Graham Wallas called incubation. Wallas’s first stage is preparation. The creative person develops some preliminary interest in a particular subject, collects material, and reads everything he can find about it. Next, a period of time intervenes during which the accumulated material simmers, or is unconsciously scanned, compared with other mental contents, organized, or elaborated. We do not understand what goes on during this period of incubation, but it is a necessary prelude to the next stage, that of illumination. This is the time at which the creative person has a new insight, discovers a solution to his problem, or in some other way finds that he can order the material which he has accumulated by employing an overriding principle or an all-embracing conception.

The time taken for incubation can vary from a few minutes to months or even years. Brahms said that, when a new idea occurred to him, he would turn to something else and perhaps think no more of the new idea for several months. When he took it up again, he would find that the idea had unconsciously assumed a different form at which he would begin working.

It would be absurd to suggest that the new idea was reverberating through the networks of the brain for several months to the exclusion of all else. The brain is highly complicated, and capable of carrying out a great many operations simultaneously. But the parallel with the scanning or sorting process which occurs spontaneously in dreams, or which is deliberately encouraged by prayer or meditation, is striking. What takes place in the circuitry of the brain is a mystery; but it can be confidently asserted that these processes require time, passivity, and preferably solitude. Creative people may or may not need the peace of being physically alone. Schubert and Mozart, for example, could concentrate on their ideas in circumstances which others would find distracting. But observers have generally noted that such people are greatly absorbed with their own thoughts even when in company. Winnicott’s paradoxical description of ‘being alone in the presence of’ may be relevant not only to the infant with its mother, but also to those who are capable of intense concentration and preoccupation with their own inner processes even when surrounded by other people.

The fact that mental processes of the kind discussed above require time, and that incubation resulting in new insights may need long periods of gestation, may also be related to one factor which some researchers have singled out as characteristic of human intelligence. Intelligent behaviour has been defined as ‘behaviour that is adaptively variable within the lifetime of the individual’.9 It is the opposite of the kind of behaviour governed by pre-programmed patterns which is characteristic of many species further down the evolutionary scale. Behaviour determined by built-in responses to environmental stimuli is both automatic and immediate. Human behaviour, which is in most circumstances much more flexible, not only depends upon learning, and hence upon memory, but also upon the capacity not to respond immediately and automatically to a given stimulus. Stenhouse suggests that, if intelligent behaviour is to evolve from instinctive behaviour, three basic factors must be developed.

The most important factor is that which gives the individual animal the power not to respond in the usual way to the stimulus situation which previously initiated an instinctive sequence culminating in a consummately act. This power not to respond may be absolute, or may be merely the ability to delay the response – withhold it provisionally, as it were – but its absence would negate the very possibility of adaptive variability in behaviour.10