Solitude

The fear of finding oneself alone, that is what they suffer from and so they don’t find themselves at all - Andre Gide 

Human beings are social by nature and unfit to endure extreme cases of isolation. If we are alone for too long our mental faculty can degrade leading to states of insanity and deep despair. 

The use of solitary confinement has historical roots, indicating that people have long understood just how deeply the fear of isolation runs through our veins. But in our modern days, our fear are not restricted to extreme forms of isolation rather many of us fear being alone for any extended period of time. 

Many thinkers have suggested that the fear of solitude is at root a fear of oneself. In our normal daily routines in which we are busy with work and chores and most often in the presence of others, our social personality comes to the fore and frightening thoughts and emotions are pushed outside of our awareness. 

But one away from the restricting confines of others, these darker aspects of ourselves tend to rise to the surface and make there presence known. 

Hence, we can say there is a danger in spending a significant amount of time isolated from others as there will come a time when broken down by a beast within solitude will weigh us down and become a great curse. 

There are some who can endure this crisis of solitude, one through heroic effort tame and infegrate the darkness within, but most would be destroy by such a confrontation, which is why Nietzsche thought many should be dissuaded from solitude. 

The different response for those from whom solitude ness is too heavy a weight to bear is to cling to others to ensure, they never feel alone. 

One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to loose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you. Wrote Nietzsche 

Those who loose themselves and others may be saved from their solitude. But they always turn out to be crippled versions of the person they could have become. 

In order for us to actualise our potential, we need to fulfil our higher needs. 

Psychologist Abraham Maslow states these higher needs include the drive for truth, beauty and goodness. These needs cannot be completely fulfilled by other people. An attempt to fulfil the totality of our higher needs, through an intimate relationship will result in a godlike idealisation of the partner and result into a slavish dependence on them for our self worth and identity. 

Ernest Becker in its book Denial of death writes - 

“If the partner becomes God he can just as easily become the Devil; the reason is not far to seek. For one thing, one becomes bound to the object in dependency. ... No wonder that dependency, whether of the god or of the slave in the relationship, carries with it so much underlying resentment.”

To ensure we don’t like many individuals today fall victim to depend drive relationships. 

We must develop with the 20th century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s idea which is called the “capacity to be alone”

When the dead of solitude makes us dependent on others we become overly compliant out of a fear of abandonment and this build up, what Winnicott called a false self, that is, our personality becomes a mere reflection of how we belive others want us to be. 

It is developing the capacity to be alone that the false self can be broken down thought when it caught rendering us able to rediscover our true self or in other words - our authentic feelings and needs. In moderns day most die oblivious to the Benefit of solitude instead many adhere to what is called object relations theory. 

This theory is based on the two key assumptions that the maturation of ones personality can only be facilitated through interpersonal relationships and that these relationships are the primary, if not sole, source of meaning of life. 

John Boeley in his attachment and loss wrote “Intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person's life revolves, not only as an infant or a toddler or a schoolchild but throughout adolescence and years of maturity as well, and on into old age.”

Taken to their extreme the assumption held by object relationship theorists imply that the individual life has no meaning apart from interpersonal relationships thus overlooking the well established fact that meaning can be found as personal growth stimulated when we cultivate in solitude a relationships with some form of creative work that consumes our attention.

In solitude we can loose our character away from the often constructed external demand of others and maintain our independence in the relationships we do cultivate thus ensuring we do not like many today lose our identity in them. 

Yet if we flourish in solitude we must not dismiss the dangers of if it while neither spoke of. 

We can increase our capacity to deal with these danger however if we consider the possible that the Benefits of solitude are embedded in dangers, meaning that it is only by voluntarily seeking our solitude and confronting the darkness within that we can extract the benefits of being alone and perhaps even eventually attain that rare self confidence of one who has gained sovereignty over himself.

As poet Rainer Maria Rilke said: 

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance.