Ch. 8: Existential Isolation Flashcards
What do we learn from deep inquiry?
The process of deepest inquiry leads us to recognize that we are finite, that we must die, that we are free, and that we cannot escape our freedom. We also learn that the individual is inexorably alone.
3 types of isolation
Interpersonal isolation: generally experienced as loneliness, refers to isolation from other individuals
- Function of many factors: geographic isolation, lack of appropriate social skills, conflicted feelings about intimacy, personality style (schizoid, narcissistic, exploitative, judgemental)
- Cultural factors also play a role
- Environment, e.g. in US there’s been a decline of intimacy-sponsoring institutions - extended family, the stable residential neighborhood, the church, local merchants, the family doctor
Intrapersonal isolation: process whereby one partitions off parts of oneself
Existential Isolation
Yalom will focus just on Existential Isolation to keep the text to a manageable length
- However, the three are connected, they feel the same and masquerade for one another
- Therapists frequently mistake them
- Existential isolation is often kept within manageable bounds through interpersonal affiliation
Whole again
To make oneself whole again is the goal of most psychotherapies
Note the common etymological root of “whole”, “heal”, “healthy”, “hale”
Existential isolation
Existential isolation refers to an unbridgeable gulf between oneself and any other being. Even further, a separation between the individual and the world.
Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward, the protagonist, Angel
“He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.”
DEATH AND EXISTENTIAL ISOLATION
Heidegger “My death”
It is the knowledge of “my death” that makes one fully realize that no one can die with one or for one.
Heidegger: “No one can take the other’s death away from him.”
We may be surrounded with friends, though others might die for the same cause, or at the same time, still at the most fundamental level dying is the most lonely human experience
Everyman
Everyman is visited by Death who says that everyman must take his final pilgrimage to God
- Everyman asks the character Kindred to go along, but he refuses (“As for me, ye shall go alone.”)
- He asks cousin, who pleads that she is indisposed
- He asks all the characters - Fellowship, Worldly Goods, Knowledge. Even his attributes desert him - “Beauty, strength discretion / When death bloweth his blast / They all run from me full last”
- Everyman is finally saved from the full terror of existential isolation because one figure, Good Deeds, is willing to go with him.
- That’s the message as it’s a Christian play, for the modern secular man there’s no one to come along.
The Loneliness of Being One’s Own Parent
Responsibility implies authorship; to be aware of one’s authorship means to forsake the belief that there is another who creates and guards one.
- Deep loneliness is inherent in the act of self-creation
- One becomes aware of the universe’s cosmic indifference
Defamiliarization
Highly successful executive at 12
Existential isolation impregnates the “paste of things”, the bedrock of the world.
- But it is so hidden by layer upon layer of worldly artifacts, each imbued with personal and collective meaning that we experience only a world of everydayness, of routine activities, of the “they”
- We are lulled into a sense of cozy belongingness; the primordial world of vast emptiness is buried and silenced, only to speak in brief bursts during nightmares and mythic visions
A highly successful executive patient of Yalom had a moment at 12 when he was lying on grass, looked at the sky and had the experience of drifting away into space between stars and the earth.
- He insists that the helplessness and aloness was so powerful that then and there he decided to make himself so renowned and mighty that he would never have this feeling again
PS! Yalom doesn’t believe in one-time decisions
Robert Frost
Kurt Reinhardt
Heidegger
Kierkegaard
Antonioni
Of course, this experience is not “out there”, it’s within us. Robert Frost:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between the stars - on stars where no human race is
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places
Kurt Reinhardt:
“What threatens is “nothing” (no thing), and he finds himself alone and lost in the void. But when this dark and terrible night of anguish has passed, man breathes a sigh or relief and tells himself: it was “nothing” after all. He has experienced “nothingness.”
Heidegger uses the term “uncanny” (“not at home”) to refer to the state in which one loses the sense of familiarity in the world. Anxiety serves as a guide to lead one back, by way of uncanniness to awareness of isolation and nothingness.
- As dasein falls, anxiety brings back from its absorption in the “world”. Everyday familiarity collapses… “Being-in” enters into the existential “mode” of the “not-at-home.” Nothing else is meant by our talk of “uncanniness.”
The ultimate dread occurs in the face of nothing. Both Kierkegaard and Heidegger were fond of word play involving nothing. “Of what is man afraid?” “Of nothing!”
Italian filmmaker Antonioni was a master at portraying defamiliarization, e.g. The Eclipse
Defamiliarization involves more than objects
Roles, values, guidelines, rules, ethics
- “Disidentification” exercise in chapter 5 in which participant has to answer the question “Who am I” and then meditate on the experience of giving up each of these (man, father, son, dentist, husband, catholic, bob)
- Some experience being “a disembodied spirit gliding in a void”
Social explosions
Uncanny are the social explosions that suddenly uproot the values, ethics and morals that we have come to believe exists independently of ourselves
- The Holocaust, mob violence, Jonestown massacre, chaos of war, all of these strike horror in us because they are evil
- They also stun us because they inform that nothing is as we have always thought it to be, that contingency reigns, that everything could be otherwise than it is
- That there is no solid ground
- That we are “not-at-home” here or there or anywhere in the world
GROWTH AND EXISTENTIAL ISOLATION
The dilemma of fusion-isolation
The words of growth imply separateness: autonomy (self-governing), self-reliance, standing on one’s own feet, individuation, being one’s own person, independence. Not to separate means not to grow op, but the toll of separating and growing up is isolation.
The problem of relationship is a problem of fusion-isolation.
- On one hand, one must learn to relate to another without giving way to the desire to slip out of isolation by becoming part of that other.
- On the other hand, one must also learn to relate to another without reducing the other to a tool, a defense against isolation.
- Bugental: “The human being’s basic interpersonal task is to be at once “a-part-of” and “a-part-from”.
As I shall now discuss, it is the facing of aloneness that ultimately allows one to engage another deeply and meaningfully.
How does one shield oneself from the dread of ultimate isolation?
One may take a portion of the isolation into oneself and bear it courageously
Or to give up singleness and enter into a relationship with another, either with a being like oneself or a divine being
- However, “I will differ from traditional interpersonal psychology and will not focus on security, attachment, self-validation, satisfaction of lust, or power, but instead shall view relationships according to how they assuage fundamental and universal isolation.”
Yalom: “I believe if we are able to acknowledge our isolated situations and confront them with resoluteness, we will be able to turn lovingly toward others.”
NEED-FREE LOVE
In order to fully understand what relationship is not it is first necessary to understand what a relationship can be.
Martin Buber
“In the beginning is the relation.”
- Buber’s proclamation is rooted in his Jewish mystical thought and modern relational theory
- He believed that the individual is part of the Covenant - each contains a divine spark that in concert reveal the holy presence
- Each is united through the spiritual association to the universe
- “Man does not exist as a separate entity, man is a create of the between”
“I-It” and the “I-Thou”
“I-It”: relationship between a person and equipment, a “functional” relationship
“I-Thou”: wholly mutual relationship involving a full experiencing of the other
- Differs from empathy because empathy is merely an “I” attempting to relate to “other”, but in “I-Thou” there is no “I” as such
- In “I-Thou” it’s not the “I” that has pre-eminent reality - an “I” that can decide to relate to “Its” or “Thous” that are objects floating into one’s field of vision
- The “I” is “betweenness” - it appears and is shaped in the context of some relationship
- With each “Thou” and with each moment of the relationship the “I” is created anew
- When one relates to a “Thou” one’s whole being is involved
- When relating to “It” - whether a thing or a person made to a thing - one holds back something of oneself: observing from many different perspectives, categorizing, analyzing, judging and deciding upon its position in the grand scheme of things
True listening
If one is to truly relate to another, one must truly listen to the other
- Relinquish stereotypes and anticipations
- Allow oneself to be shaped by the other’s response
- Buber’s distinction between “genuine” and “pseudo” listening obviously has important implications for the therapeutic relationship