The Interface of Edges

On an initial reading, Klein’s and Winnicott’s writing about “the sense of loneliness”(Klein, 1963) or “the capacity to be alone”(Winnicott, 1958), it is unclear whether a similar or different stages of development are being referred too. This paper examines these notions and concludes that the “sense of loneliness” and “ the capacity to be alone” refer to different developmental stages in the separation individuation process and arise from very different conceptualisations about the beginnings of an infant’s psychic life.

Two examples, one developmental and the other clinical are explored in depth. The first example explores the emotional development of an 11 month-old baby boy who is beginning to develop a sense of being a separate self which then comes under threat. The second example explores the psychodynamics of a patient in long term psychotherapy who cannot bear separateness and reacts with primitive defence mechanisms such as splitting.
These examples are examined using Winnicott’s thinking about illusion and Milner’s model of overlapping circles. The purpose is to show how these concepts open up new pathways of thinking particularly because the notion of illusion is a concept that straddles both the inner and the outer world.

Keywords: the sense of loneliness, the capacity to be alone, paranoid schizoid position, illusional space, transitional phenomena, overlapping circles, intrapsychic-psychosocial dimension.