Loneliness, Love, and the Limits of Language

Tietjen, Ruth Rebecca; Furtak, Rick Anthony

doi:10.1111/sjp.12431

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…But I felt an immense and aching solitude. (Styron, 2010, 26) Feeling isolated or disconnected does not neatly map onto physically being around other people or not; I can be at home on my own without feeling isolated or I can be in the middle of a busy party and feel completely alone (Roberts and Krueger, 2021;Tietjen and Furtak, 2021). Although the discomfort of feeling isolated while around others may prompt depressed individuals to avoid physically being with other people, the painful disconnection that is spoken of in depression does not appear to be grounded in being physically absent from others.…”

Section: Physically Being With Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“An illness of isolation, a disease of disconnection”: Depression and the erosion of we-experiences

Osler

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Depression is an affective disorder involving a significant change in an individual’s emotional and affective experiences. While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM) mentions that social impairment may occur in depression, first-person reports of depression consistently name isolation from others as a key feature of depression. I present a phenomenological analysis of how certain interpersonal relations are experienced in depression. In particular, I consider whether depressed individuals are able to enter into “we-experiences” with other people. We-experiences are experiences had with two or more people as a we (rather than having an experience as an I), experiences that allow one to enter into robustly shared experiences with others. I claim that the ability to enter into we-experiences (both actual and habitual) is eroded in depression due to an overwhelming feeling of being different to and misunderstood by others. As such, I suggest that depression should be conceived of as fixing an individual in their first-person singular perspective, thus inhibiting their ability to experience in the first-person plural and to feel a sense of connectedness or togetherness with others as part of a we. By attending to on-going impacts of a diminished ability to enter into we-experiences, we can provide a situated and more nuanced account of the changes of interpersonal relations in depression that captures the progressive (rather than static) nature of the disorder. In turn, this analysis furthers our understanding of the emergence, frustration, and erosion of actual and habitual we-experiences.

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Section: Physically Being With Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“An illness of isolation, a disease of disconnection”: Depression and the erosion of we-experiences

Osler

2022

Front. Psychol.

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“…But loneliness is not just a subjective condition. As psychologists note, the term “loneliness” can pick out an objective condition, too (Ma et al 2020 ; Tietjen and Furtak 2021 ). Someone can live an unusually solitary life largely devoid of social contact without missing the interpersonal connections and relationships many crave.…”

Section: The Character and Significance Of Lonelinessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Loneliness and Absence in Psychopathology

Krueger

Osler

Roberts

2023

Topoi

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Loneliness is a near-universal experience. It is particularly common for individuals with (so-called) psychopathological conditions or disorders. In this paper, we explore the experiential character of loneliness, with a specific emphasis on how social goods are experienced as absent in ways that involve a diminished sense of agency and recognition. We explore the role and experience of loneliness in three case studies: depression, anorexia nervosa, and autism. We demonstrate that even though experiences of loneliness might be common to many psychopathologies, these experiences nevertheless have distinctive profiles. Specifically, we suggest that: (i) loneliness is often a core characteristic of depressive experience; (ii) loneliness can drive, and even cement, disordered eating practices and anorectic identity in anorexia nervosa; iii) loneliness is neither a core characteristic of autism nor a driver but is rather commonly experienced as stemming from social worlds, environments, and norms that fail to accommodate autistic bodies and their distinctive forms of life. We aim to do justice to the pervasiveness of loneliness in many — if not all — psychopathologies, while also highlighting the need to attend to psychopathology-specific experiences of loneliness, agency, and (non-)recognition.

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“…The first is the longstanding debate about the qualitative aspect of experience-its subjective dimension or "what's-it-like"-ness-that is largely but not exclusively conducted in phenomenology. Tietjen and Furtak [19] investigate this subjective aspect of loneliness. The second is the debate about the internal structure of a person's mental life and its relation to the environment in which she operates.…”

Section: Experience As a Necessary Condition Of Lonelinessmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Psychological Structure of Loneliness

Seemann

2022

IJERPH

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Despite the current surge of interest in loneliness, its health consequences, and possible remedies, the concept itself remains poorly understood. This paper seeks to contribute to a more fully worked out account of what loneliness consists in. It does this by stressing that loneliness always has an experiential component and by introducing a simple psychological structure to analyze the experience. On this basis, it suggests that we can distinguish between three ways of thinking about the phenomenal dimension of loneliness. There are objectivist views that seek to understand loneliness by a description of its intentional object, subjectivist views that consider its holistic relation to other aspects of the sufferer’s psyche, and embodied and enacted views that focus on the relation between the lonely person’s mental life and her social environment. The aim is not to adjudicate between these views or to suggest that they are mutually exclusive. Rather, this paper recommends a pluralistic framework on which all three approaches have something to contribute to a fuller understanding of the condition and may be of use in devising measures aimed at improving sufferers’ mental health.

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Loneliness, Love, and the Limits of Language

Cited by 9 publications

References 30 publications

“An illness of isolation, a disease of disconnection”: Depression and the erosion of we-experiences

“An illness of isolation, a disease of disconnection”: Depression and the erosion of we-experiences

Loneliness and Absence in Psychopathology

The Psychological Structure of Loneliness

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