Register Now Online for Symposium 2012: On Loneliness
Posted December 30th, 2011 by Tamar SchwartzCategories: Uncategorized
Symposium 2012: On Loneliness
Guldwurm Auditorium Mount Sinai Medical Center
March 24th, 2012
Loneliness is perhaps one of the most painful affective states a person can experience. It is a subjective experience that most of us have, at some point in our lives, had. It may be experienced as an intense emptiness or solitude, an isolation from others both internal and/or external. Or, it can be experienced as grief; a loneliness in the presence of others. It can be also be understood by its duration (e.g., temporary or chronic) or, as Sartre noted, an essential feature of the human condition. Sartre believed this condition arose from conflict between the need to create meaning in life and the awareness of isolation or nothingness in the universe. For a psychoanalyst this idea might translate into an infantile experience of needing the mother and becoming aware that she is not always available. For a psychoanalyst this idea might translate into an infantile experience of needing the mother and becoming aware that she is not always available.
Chronic loneliness has been linked to physical (e.g., cancer, stroke, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease) and psychological (e.g., depression and schizoid pathology, impaired cognition and personal determination, sleep disturbance, suicide, alcoholism and substance abuse) difficulties. As we can see from the variety of manifestations loneliness is often a complex phenomena in both its aetiology and presentation.
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