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.
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.
"A fascinating, original contribution to a neglected area in the psychoanalytic literature, with wide and deep ramifications. As a psychoanalytic treatment of an everyday human experience, it represents a genre of which I would like to see more. Psychoanalysis can only benefit by leaving the ivory tower of metapsychology and descending into the hurly burly of quotidian life in a way which enriches our understanding of familiar human dilemmas." Karl Loszak, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice, Toronto, Canada
"It is impossible to do justice to the book's riches in a brief review... Psychotherapy and counselling can be lonely activities but, through reading this book, I feel less lonely and more connected to a community oflike-minded colleagues. The book is a valuable resource for psychodynamic practitioners, those who include psychodynamic elements within their integration, and all those interested in a relational way of working and whoare not afraid to go into thedepths both of their own and their clients' experience. I will return to this book again and again." - Els van Ooijen, Therapy Today, April 2012
