Being Alone in Hard Times
Photo by Tomé Louro from Pexels David Levine is a Contributor
People need to be with other people. It’s just the way they are. Or so we are told. And, of course, it is not hard to find evidence to support this “fact.” Consider the Mayor of Denver who, shortly after exhorting citizens to stay home over the holiday, got on a plane and flew to Mississippi to join his family for Thanksgiving dinner. Clearly, some irresistible force drove him to risk not only infection but the predictably negative public response to his action.
It is worth emphasizing that, by making his trip home, the mayor not only put his own health at risk, he risked the health of others who, were he to get infected, might catch the virus from him. Further, by undermining his own sound advice, he risked weakening compliance in his community and increased the likelihood that stay-at-home orders would be ignored. In other words, to arrive at his decision to take a trip, there was much that he had to put out of mind: concern for his own welfare and for the welfare of those for whom he was responsible.
In this, the mayor was not alone. It is possible that the urge driving Denver’s mayor to fly to Mississippi writ large played an important role in fueling the pandemic. How many of us found ways to justify actions that endangered ourselves and others while undermining the policies that could limit the damage done by the coronavirus? How many of us decided that whether we followed stay-at-home orders was a matter on which we should use our own judgment? How many of us assumed that, if we know the people with whom we will be gathering, we will be safe with them? How many of us operated on the principle that only strangers pose a threat?
Thinking this way enabled many people to justify doing things whose purpose was not to protect themselves and others but to avoid being alone. To the extent that this is the case, it follows that, were people better able to tolerate being alone, measures taken to “flatten the curve” through social isolation might have worked, or at least they might have worked better than they did. It may be useful, then, to ask: What is it about being alone we find so hard to bear?
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To answer this question, it will be helpful to move away from the idea that we are alone when there is no one else around. This is because there is an important sense in which we are never really alone; and it is the fact that we are never alone that either sustains us when other people are not around or makes that situation intolerable. We are never alone because, even when there is no one else sharing our space in the world outside, there are always others to be found in our inner worlds. These others are the figures that populate our memories, dreams, and fantasies. We recall conversations with them. We rewrite the scripts of those conversations to fix what went wrong when we had them. We produce substitutes for the figures in our memories that work better for us than they did. We take vengeance on them for harms, real or imagined, they have done to us. We have dreams about them. And, most notably, through fantasy, we experience in their absence the emotions provoked when they are present. What we find when we turn away from the outside world, then, is not an empty space. We find instead a world filled with representations of other people in settings where our interaction with them defines or articulates a state of mind or mood.
The quality of the inner world determines the kind of experience we have when we are alone in the sense of being in a space where there are no others present. If to be alone means to suffer from bad dreams, painful memories, and anxiety-ridden fantasies, then being alone will be difficult. If we have a sufficient store of good memories, are not tormented by bad dreams, and our fantasies take us places where we find love and gratification, then we have inner resources to resist, when necessary, the powerful need for the company of friends and family: we we have them with us when they are not around. The better the experiences on which our memories and fantasies are based, the less our mental energy needs to be devoted to fixing them, the more dwelling in our minds can be a source of comfort. Put another way, the more comfort we can find in introspection, the better able we will be to take care of ourselves. As clearly depicted in the film Home Alone, the problem is not that we are alone; the problem is who we are with when we are alone.
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The quality of our inner space reflects the quality of our relationships, especially the early formative relationships we have internalized as memory and fantasy, both conscious and unconscious. The more problematic those relationships, the more we seek to escape the inner world by spending as little time alone as possible. Or, if we must be alone, we seek activities to assure, as far as possible, we are not in contact with those figures in our inner worlds whose presence there causes us to suffer. Through those activities we seek to “get out of ourselves” by distracting ourselves from threatening feeling states.
This does not mean that having good formative experiences with other people obviates the adult need for relationships. Not at all. But what it does do is lessen the power of the imperative to spend as much time as possible outside our heads, which is the problem some face during hard times. When the outside world becomes a dangerous place to be and the inner world is populated by bad memories and disturbing fantasies, we have nowhere to go. So we find ways to justify venturing into the world outside that mainly involve forming the judgment that, however dangerous the outside world might be, it is not as dangerous as the place in which we will find ourselves if we cannot go there.
One important reason we favor the outside world when the inner world is a dangerous place to be is the hope that we will find outside relationships that can replace the unsatisfactory ones that populate our inner worlds. In a sense, what we are doing is enlisting other people in our struggle against the power of remembered relationships and troubling fantasy figures. Memories and fantasy figures have considerable power to provoke unwelcome states of mind such as guilt, shame, and hopelessness. If our internal resources are too weak to counter those feelings, we might seek people in the world outside to assist us in doing so. This need for allies in our internal struggles can drive us to join together in groups, both large and small, of those who share our need.
The problem is exacerbated when a real threat outside, such as the coronavirus, aligns itself with the danger posed to us by dwelling in the mind, which is the danger of being taken over by bad feelings. Thus, when the president insisted that the threat did not exist, he offered a defense against bad feelings while, at the same time, aligning himself with memories and fantasies featuring abandonment and neglect. By doing so, he empowered both the internal figures we associate with absence of care together with the emotions associated with them and at the same time our defenses against them, most notably in the form of denial that they exist. This alignment of a real external threat with a painful internal experience can shift the balance in favor of flight from the risk within and toward seeking those in the world outside we think we can call on as allies (Proud Boys, “stand back, stand by”, our emphasis) in the battle against our darker emotions.
An important consequence of the flight from being alone that bears on our response to the virus is impairment in our capacity to assess risk. Impairment in this capacity is due to the fact that any strengthening of the dark mood in the inner world shifts the balance in risk assessment by making the adverse consequences of being alone greater. At the same time, when the flight from the inner world takes the form of seeking the company of others, it empowers impulse over better judgment, and by so doing limits our ability to make decisions most likely to protect us and others from danger.
It is notable, then, that those states that followed the President in defying the advice of experts generally did so in the name of “freedom and personal responsibility.” In the effort to control the virus, it was best, they insisted, to leave it up to the individual. But, when following the advice of health professionals requires individuals to do something that involves social isolation, their capacity to make judgments can be significantly impaired if their inner worlds make being alone hard to bear. This impairment affects both their capacity to take care of themselves and their capacity to consider the wellbeing of others.
By empowering memories and fantasies formed in response to problematic formative experiences, the Trump administration also provoked the aggression attached to those memories and fantasies. This heightened state of aggression is apparent in the conflict over the response to the virus, a conflict that seriously weakened the nation’s ability to cope with the threat it posed and moderate the harm done. Heightened fear and aggression in the outside world align with the fear and aggression that already dominate internally, empowering the latter to control what we do.
Alignment between a problematic inner world and a dangerous world outside undermined whatever capacity to be alone was available to the individual even as it increased the risk posed by other people. The result was to place people in a double bind that made the kind of thinking needed to assess risk difficult to access. The net result was to undermine the effort on the part of public authorities to control the virus. All of this suggests how strengthening people’s capacity to be alone can be a valuable goal not only because it makes the important emotional experience of dwelling in the mind possible but also because it makes public policy more effective. It simultaneously enhances our capacity to care for ourselves and our capacity to concern ourselves with the consequences of what we do for the welfare of others.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965) The capacity to be alone. In The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. Madison CT: International Universities, 1965. Originally published 1958.