Solitude

by Anthony Storr

  Temperamental differences between human beings may be chiefly determined genetically, but are, of course, influenced by a variety of environmental factors during the individual’s development. We have so far been considering varieties of temperament which are ‘normal’, but neurotic attitudes, and psychotic attitudes also, are but exaggerations of normal human tendencies. At the time of writing, it is generally considered that the highly introverted person is more pathological than the very extraverted person. This is because of the current emphasis upon object relationships, and the disregard of processes which take place in solitude. However, there is a link between extraversion and introversion and two different types of personality which can be labelled pathological, and which may be disturbed in any degree from the slightly cranky to the psychotic. I shall refer to these two varieties of personality as depressive and schizoid. All such classifications of personality are inadequate, since they fail to do justice to man’s infinite variety. But if we are to make any attempt to understand the different ways in which different kinds of individuals experience the world, we must use classifications as guidelines. What is particularly relevant to our present purposes is that both types of person have an especial need to be alone, although for different reasons.

  Chapter 2 was concerned with the capacity to be alone. The need to be alone differs from the capacity to be alone in its suggestion that, at times, other people constitute a hindrance, interference, or threat.

  At first sight, it may seem odd to write of extraverts needing to be alone since, by definition, extraverts are open, sociable people whose whole way of life is characterized by their confident relationship with others. However, as we hinted earlier, extraverts may lose contact with their subjective needs by becoming over-involved with, or losing themselves in, their objects. This is especially so of the type of extraverted person I call depressive, but is also part of the experience of most of us.

  Most members of Western cultures have had the experience of finding particular social occasions exhausting, and have welcomed the opportunity of a retreat into privacy in order to recover and ‘be themselves’ again. If society is to function smoothly, there are bound to be occasions when one has to pretend; be welcoming when one is tired; smile when one wants to groan; or in other ways put on an act. Such dissimulation is fatiguing.

  The Victorian lady used regularly to retire for a ‘rest’ in the afternoon. She needed to do so because convention demanded that she should constantly be empathically alert to the needs of others without regard to any needs of her own. Her afternoon rest allowed her to recuperate from the social role of dutiful listener and ministering angel; a role which allowed no scope for self-expression. Even Florence Nightingale, who was far from being merely a ministering angel, found that the only way in which she could study and write was to develop a neurotic illness which released her from the burden of household duties and enabled her to retire to the solitude of the bedroom.

  Social pretences are temporary and deliberate examples of the device of the false self, based upon compliance, which Winnicott described, and which was discussed in Chapter 2. Winnicott was concerned with patients who had habitually adopted this mask from early childhood; who had lost touch with their true, inner feelings, and who were therefore unaware that they were living lives which were inauthentic. But most well-behaved adults feel that, on some social occasions, they need to be more than usually compliant, and remain well aware that the persona which they are presenting does not reflect their true feelings. There is always some discrepancy between an individual’s public face and what he is in private.

  People vary considerably in the degree to which they can be their true selves in company. Some enviable mortals seem able, from their earliest years, to express whatever they are feeling in the presence of comparative strangers without fear of being rebuffed, disapproved of, contradicted, or made to feel foolish. It seems likely that this kind of security springs from repeated experiences of the kind which Winnicott describes: of having been able, as an infant, to be alone in the presence of the mother without anxiety; and, in later childhood, of feeling loved and unconditionally accepted.

  Other individuals find it difficult to be authentically themselves even in the presence of their spouses, lovers, or closest friends and relatives. Such individuals, whilst not going so far as to construct a false self which entirely replaces the true self at a conscious level, have an especial need to be alone which goes beyond the occasional demand for solitude referred to above. One possibility, plausible but as yet unproven, is that this especial need to be alone in adult life is derived from, or has been enhanced by, some degree of insecure attachment in early childhood. The child who has not, in infancy, formed secure bonds of trust with attachment figures, may react to parents, and later to other people, in a variety of ways; but I suggest that these variants are founded upon two basic themes. The first is placation; the second, avoidance. I shall try to show that placation is associated with the development of a depressive personality, whilst avoidance is associated with the development of a schizoid personality.

  We are not yet in a position to determine all the factors which govern whether or not an infant becomes securely attached. As noted in Chapter 1, attachment varies in quality and in intensity. It is certain that insecure attachment, though sometimes the result of injudicious handling, lack of affection, or rejection by the mother, is not always to be blamed on her. Infants differ genetically, and some may be incapable of forming secure bonds of attachment, however much loving care they are given. This is true of some children who are later termed ‘autistic’.

  One common pattern of parent-child interaction which leads to insecurity and over-compliance can be outlined. A child who is not spurned nor in any way ill-treated may yet grow up to feel that his parents’ love for him is conditional. Such a child comes to believe that continuance of his parents’ love for him, and hence his security, depends, not upon being his authentic self, but upon being what his parents require him to be. Parents who induce this kind of belief in their children are often deeply concerned about their welfare, but are apt to demand impossibly high standards of ‘good’ behaviour, making the child believe that its instinctive drives and spontaneous responses are wrong. In extreme instances, this leads to the formation of a false self built on identification with the parent, and the total repression of the true self. In less extreme cases, the child displays a false self when in the company of others, but maintains a true self which only emerges when he is alone. This is one reason for developing an especial need to be alone.

  A child who shows this kind of partial compliance is clearly not going to incorporate the inner sense of his own worth which develops in children who are certain that their parents’ love for them will be unconditionally continued. Confidence that one is of value and significance as a unique individual is one of the most precious possessions which anyone can have. Whether or not genetic factors are concerned with the development of this kind of confidence, it is certainly furthered or hindered by the quality of love which parents extend.

  Children who feel that they have to be compliant to the extent of partially denying or repressing their true natures are bound to remain dependent on external sources for the maintenance of self-esteem. Such a child will develop into an adult who will continue to feel that he has to be successful, or good, or approved of by everyone, if he is to retain any sense of his own value. This necessarily makes him especially vulnerable to the reverses in life which we all have to endure: to failure in an examination or in competition for a job; to rejection by an actual or potential lover; to bereavement or to any other form of loss. Such unpleasant events make all of us temporarily resentful or low-spirited or both; but, in the case of those who possess little or no built-in self-esteem, may precipitate a devastating plunge into the hell of severe depression.

  People who react to disapproval, failure, or loss by becoming so severely depressed that they are clearly ‘ill’, seem to lack
any inner resources to which they may turn in the face of misfortune. For them, hazards which to others are challenges precipitate feelings of total hopelessness and helplessness. Some business men who become bankrupt set to and start a new enterprise. Others cast themselves from a window on the thirtieth floor. The latter variety behave as though there were no second chances in life; as though they were entirely dependent for maintaining their self-esteem upon the success of whatever enterprise was currently engaging them, without taking into account past blessings or future possibilities. It is as if any love or recognition which they had won in the past counted for nothing; as if there were nothing inside themselves to which to turn, no sense of being intrinsically worthwhile.

  Patients suffering from depression of such severity that they are labelled psychotic often complain that they feel empty; that there is something missing, a void within which can never be filled. Utterances of this kind, especially when accompanied by fears of organic disease, are often dismissed as hypochondriacal delusions. It is more appropriate to consider such statements as metaphors which express a psychological truth. Severely depressed patients really do lack something within which other, less vulnerable people possess; an incorporated sense of their own value as persons.

  People who can be precipitated into severe depression in this way are those referred to earlier as depressive personalities. It must be emphasized that this is a shorthand description which does not include every variety of potentially depressed person, but which can be aptly applied to those displaying this common type of vulnerability.

  People of this temperament, or possessing this psychopathology, usually adopt a placatory attitude toward others because they cannot afford to disagree or risk anything which might cause offence or incur disapproval. Because the price of approval is compliance, which must involve some degree of dissimulation, this type of individual needs to get away from other people in order to be himself unimpeded by the need to please.

  A ‘masochistic’, submissive stance toward others must involve the repression of aggression. The person who cannot stand up to other people, or assert himself when this is appropriate, represses his hostility. When he becomes depressed, his hostility toward others is displaced and becomes directed against himself in the form of self-reproach. As Freud pointed out in his classic paper, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, the reproaches which the depressed person levels against himself are usually explicable as reproaches which he would like to have directed at someone close to him, but which he dared not express for fear of antagonizing a person upon whose love he depends.9

  People of this kind constitute a considerable fraction of psychiatric practice. They also respond well to psychiatric treatment. It is easier to facilitate self-assertion in the timid than it is to induce humility in the overweening. But it must be emphasized that not all patients who suffer from recurrent depression are of the type just described. So-called ‘bipolar’, manic-depressive patients, who suffer from episodes of mania or hypomania as well as depression, are generally less inhibited, compliant, and self-effacing than the vulnerable people who only suffer from recurrent depression.

  If a person with a depressive personality is in any way gifted, he may find that he can best express his true self in some form of creative work rather than in interaction with others. Since people of this temperament are predominantly extraverted, dramatists rather than patterners, divergers rather than convergers, it is likely that any gifts which they possess will be channelled in the direction of story-telling, plays, poetry, opera, or toward other creative pursuits which are chiefly concerned with human beings, although the people with whom they are involved may be creatures of their imagination.

  It has sometimes been remarked that writers are disappointing to meet. This is often because their true personalities only emerge in their writings, and are concealed during the ordinary interchanges of social life. This does not apply to all writers; only to those who exhibit the temperament which has just been described. Writers, like other artists, display a variety of temperaments, from the flamboyance of a Balzac to the withdrawal of a Kafka; but the depressive temperament is particularly common amongst them.

  The second variety of person who shows a special need to be alone is introverted, and, when disturbed or clearly pathological, is labelled schizoid. It was suggested earlier that there may be a link between the development of this kind of personality and the type of infantile behaviour which attachment theorists call avoidance. Once again, it must be emphasized that such a link is speculative and would not, even if established by research, solve the problem of how far that personality type is determined by nature and how far by nurture.

  In Chapter 1, we touched on Bowlby’s work on the behaviour of young children who have been separated from the mother. When reunited with the mother after a period of separation, infants show avoidance by averting their gaze, by turning the back toward the mother, and by moving away from contact. If picked up, the infant displaying avoidance may scream and struggle, only ceasing to do so when put down. Alternatively, without struggling and screaming, it may stretch out toward some object in the room, and when set down, occupy itself with this object rather than with the mother. Such avoidance behaviour is usually only temporary and disappears after a period of time which depends partly on the duration of the separation and partly upon the infant’s previous relationship with the mother.

  But separation is not the only circumstance prompting avoidance behaviour. According to Mary Main and Donna R. Weston, mothers who show aversion to physical contact with the infant during the first three months of the infant’s life are likely to induce avoidance behaviour in the infant by the end of its first year. Mothers who demonstrate angry or threatening behaviour also induce avoidance in their infants.

  Mothers of mother-avoidant infants mocked their infants or spoke sarcastically to or about them; some stared them down.10

  Mothers who go further and actually batter their babies produce infants who, as compared with controls, are

  more avoidant of peers and care-givers in response to friendly overtures, more likely to assault and threaten to assault them, and more likely to show unpredictable aggressive behaviour toward care-givers.11

  In addition, mothers who are coldly unresponsive, that is, who show neither pleasure in response to their infants nor any reaction even when attacked by them, cause avoidance behaviour in their infants. None of these descriptions of maternal behaviour implies that such behaviour is the only cause of avoidance in the infant. Genetic differences, or brain damage, may also be implicated.

  More research is needed before a confident interpretation of the biological purpose of avoidance behaviour can be given; but one interesting idea, particularly relevant to the main theme of this book, is that avoidance may permit the infant to maintain control over, flexibility in, and organization of, its own behaviour. Mary Main and Donna Weston write:

  What is ‘behavioral disorganization’? Behavior can be called disorganized when it vacillates between opposite extremes without reference to changes in the environment or when it appears repeatedly in an environment that does not call for it.12

  When mothers both threaten their infants and also reject physical contact with them, they place them in an impossible position. Threats of any kind, from any source, stimulate an intense need for attachment on the part of the infant, because the prime function of attachment is protection from the threat of danger. But if the source of the threat is the very person to whom the infant must turn for protection, the infant is faced with a conflict which cannot be resolved. Placed in such a situation, the infant exhibits vacillation between approach, avoidance, and angry behaviour. This disorganization of behaviour can only be alleviated by the infant turning away from everything to do with the mother.

  It is clear that avoidance implies a deeper disturbance in the relation between the infant and its mother than does compliance. This may be connected with the fact that avoidance is manifested at an earlie
r stage in the infant’s development than the more sophisticated behaviour of compliance. Avoidance is connected with the fear of being damaged or destroyed by hostility. Compliance is concerned with the fear of love being withdrawn. Avoidance suggests doubt as to whether love has ever been proffered. Compliance implies recognition that love is available, but doubts whether it will last.

  These patterns of behaviour are most obviously manifested in the pathological types of personality which warrant the labels ‘schizoid’ or ‘depressive’, but can also be detected as underlying factors in the attitudes of ‘normal’ people toward others. Students of the work of Melanie Klein will at once link these ideas with yet another dichotomy: the stages of infant development which she described as the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’ and the ‘depressive position’. Although many of Melanie Klein’s concepts remain unproven and unprovable, her belief that ‘psychotic’ mechanisms underlie and affect the emotional attitudes of ‘normal’ people is convincing. For example, it is only if we accept the existence of a latent paranoid potential lurking in the recesses of the normal mind that we can explain the mass delusions which led to the persecution of witches and the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. Vast numbers of ordinary men and women held beliefs about witches and Jews which, if they had been expressed by one or two individuals instead of by whole communities, would have been dismissed as paranoid delusions. There are extremely primitive, irrational mental forces at work in the minds of all of us which are usually overlaid and controlled by reason, but which find overt expression in the behaviour of those whom we call mentally ill, and which also manifest themselves in the behaviour of normal people when under threat or other forms of stress. No one is so exquisitely well-balanced that he or she does not use avoidance or compliance to some extent in encounters with other people. Yet these attitudes can justifiably be linked with the very early varieties of behaviour in infants which were described above, and also with the pathological phenomena characteristic of the insane.