Loneliness

I

AT the risk of taxing the reader’s indulgence we must start from afar; as we gather momentum the subject will be dealt with at close quarters; it shall not escape us.

For reasons which appear obvious to many but which are actually obscure, it is not considered comme il faut to talk about one’s self. One’s private life is supposed to stay private and we don’t like those who ‘make an exhibition of themselves.’ We consider our feelings, concerns, and emotions as things which, like some of our physiological needs, ought to remain enshrouded in total privacy. The many justifications offered for this attitude do not interest us here, because man will always find a good explanation for his feelings or urges. What matters is the fact that we do cultivate a rigid code of privacy, and at the same time we never actually give up prying into the affairs of others — hence our universal and protean propensity towards gossip. A paradoxical situation ensues: we defend our sacred right of privacy, yet we are always ready and even eager to violate this right in others. If we do our prying with an air of casualness and nonchalance it is lest our curiosity become too wanton, for we are ashamed of being too curious about things that others consider their own business. How do we settle for ourselves this contradiction of feelings, how do we solve this psychic conflict?

First, we ostensibly condemn the prying attitude of man. Once we state that we don’t like prying in others, we deny it in ourselves, and this protects us in a measure against the pressure, even the recognition, of our own failing. How many of us would ever suspect ourselves of being shadily curious? We condemn so vigorously the tabloid newspapers and the gossip columns of the daily press! Further, we condemn severely those who display themselves too freely, thus defending ourselves against any too conspicuous stimulation of the curiosity of which we are ashamed.

Second, we pretend to indulge in gossip solely for the reason of ‘getting at’ the intimate life of others in order to condemn in our fellows the unseemly and the wrong; is not gossiping always tinged with a tone, polite or crude, of derisive superiority? And when we pry into the private lives of public servants we even give our gossiping an aspect of ‘social conscience.’ Our love of rumors, or so-called ‘inside information,’ is based on the same primitive urge.

Third, we turn to the theatre, we read novels and biographies, and in so doing we gratify our curiosity with civilized substitutive information about imaginary people, or people who have lived long ago. A word of warning: this is not the only, not even the most important reason for our reading novels or going to the theatre. I merely want to say that drama, comedy, novels, and biographies are extremely suitable outlets for man’s ‘peeping’ urges, and into the enjoyment of these literary activities are smuggled the impulses which otherwise would become too blatant.

Of course it is unpleasant to establish a connection, no matter how loose and indirect, between our love for the theatre and good literature and that gossipy curiosity which we are accustomed to treat with contempt. It is unpleasant to think that our sense of common decency and discretion is somehow connected with our more primitive sense of prying into other people’s affairs. But let us not be shocked, for the nature of man was not created to please man, and even the most ardent teleologist would not say that nature invented man in order to satisfy him with a justifiable sense of his own nobility. Let us not be shocked; let us recall, rather, the words of Nietzsche about the English psychologists: ’I wish from my heart . . . that these analysts with their psychological microscopes should be at bottom brave, proud, and magnanimous animals who know how to bridle their hearts and smarts and have specifically trained themselves to sacrifice what is desirable to what is true — any truth, in fact, even the simple bitter, ugly, repulsive, unchristian, and immoral truths, for there are truths of that description.‘

If we are not shocked by the dynamic force within us, this reverse side of discretion, let us look into it. What is its nature, its source, and what of its sphere of influence? That human beings since time immemorial showed a propensity to pry and to gossip, and that the most civilized society is frequently — if not always — preoccupied with it, indicates that we deal here with some fundamental and powerful urge which history, culture, religion, democracy, industrial civilization, aeroplanes, or streamline trains all have failed to eradicate. The serious psychologist of to-day does not pass over the manifestations of this urge; he becomes interested in it because it is so persistent a phenomenon; he treats it with scientific respect; ‘the bitter, ugly, repulsive, unchristian, and immoral’ nature of it does not particularly preoccupy him.

Looking calmly at the phenomenon, he soon discerns in it a singular characteristic. It appears that man, whatever his profession or confession, derives definite pleasure from gossiping, not because he is so lovingly interested in others, but because he is so self-admiringly interested in himself. Man pries into his neighbor’s business not because of any altruistic sense, but because he feels the need of showing others up and thereby and therewith, sub rosa, showing himself off. It is a form of unabated self-love, a special form of it, in which he indulges himself. It is not the self-love which in a moment of danger appears as a selfdefensive emotion; it is not self-preservation; it is merely a constant play with people and things, sometimes subdued and rationalized, and not always devoid of malice, which gratifies an inherent self-admiration as elemental as it is constant. This type of sheer selfishness is called narcissism.

II

The term ‘narcissism’ does not mean mere selfishness, or egocentricity, as is assumed; it denotes specifically that state of mind, that spontaneous attitude of man, in which the individual himself happens to choose only himself instead of others as the object to love. Not that he does not love, or that he hates, others and wants everything for himself; but he is inwardly in love with himself and seeks everywhere for a mirror in which to admire and woo his own image. Narcissus had no feeling for the pool in which he saw his own image; he probably even failed to notice the water lilies or the tadpoles or the fishes; they were there, but not as objects to be observed and perhaps be interested in, but only as a part of the setting which makes self-admiration so cozily possible. If the mirror reflects the man too truthfully, in a manner not entirely acceptable to his avowed principles of beauty, goodness, or decency, he resorts to the trick used by La Fontaine’s monkey and known in Freudian psychology as projection: he merely thinks that it is the image of one of his fellow men and laughs at it; in so doing he preserves intact the overvalued ‘fantasied’ image of himself which he loves and admires. This is the basic attitude of the narcissistic person in his relation to the world.

What would happen to Narcissus if he lost his way to the pool? What would happen to the pryingly curious if he lost his tabloid paper or any of its gregarious substitutes? What would happen to the egocentric if he could not find an audience? What would happen to the demagogue if he failed to find an applauding crowd, or to the boisterous youngster who has no one before whom he can show off? They all, from Narcissus to the urchin, would feel themselves lost, they would experience a sense of uselessness, they would become low-spirited, somewhat irritable, and feel perhaps ill-treated by fate, lonely. Even if they tried to divert themselves by ‘doing something,’ they would find that nothing satisfied them; a feeling of emptiness would pervade them and they would appear to cower and to succumb under the burden which is loneliness.

The skeptic might now raise his voice in protest, and quite legitimately. It is possible, he would say, that these people do feel lonely, but how about the man who feels lonely because he misses someone whom he really loves? How about the loneliness, the sense of isolation, which the scholar seeks and feels when he retires to his quiet study or laboratory? Are not nostalgia and solitude much more typical expressions of normal loneliness, and do they not spring from the very best there is in man: love for one’s fellow man, or love for study and work? One is almost tempted to quote in protest from the same preface to The Genealogy of Morals, and say with Nietzsche that the modern psychologist seems to make up his psychology of ‘a little vulgarity, a little gloominess, a little unchrtstianity, and a little craving for the necessary piquancy.’

The skeptic is right. Being lonesome, missing someone we love, is quite different from the loneliness of a Narcissus who loses his pool. But what is the difference exactly ? He who misses his friend or sweetheart misses that person not because he loves only himself, but because he loves his friend or sweetheart — that is, someone outside himself; his feeling of love is not directed inward, but outward. Being lonesome under these circumstances is a form of reaching out for the one we are missing. We then write a letter, send a telegram, talk over the telephone with our friend; we patiently wait for his or her return, or we gradually find other friends, other interests, other preoccupations.

But even in this type of ‘normal loneliness we may on closer inspection discern at the beginning the germ of narcissism. The shock of separation makes us at first lose interest in everything else; we withdraw emotionally from the outside world. We appear to need it no more, and even to resent it, for we are preoccupied with the contemplation of our own misery. Yet this type of loneliness, better called lonesomeness, is not a chronic state, and usually it is self-limited. It does not require a doctor to be cured, for life itself, toward which the man who happens to be lonesome always turns, cures him sooner or later by what it has to offer. At first the lonely man may fall into the selfindulgence of taking a few drinks, thus ‘washing off with alcohol’ the pain of the narcissistic crust that separates him from the outside world. But on the whole, nostalgia, missing somebody specific, is a transient state of mind, a form of light mourning or mourning proper; and, like mourning, it has an end which comes by itself, as if ‘time cured it.’ As has been said, however, the cure sprouts and grows into full vigor from the individual himself.

This type of loneliness is therefore different in form, and particularly in psychological content, from that true and chronic loneliness which to the uninitiated appears at times to be almost constitutional. The normally nostalgic person seems to say, ‘I have no one to love and I feel sad and lonely; I feel almost hopeless, but deep in my heart I know that mine is a temporary distress. I shall regain the one I love, or sooner or later find someone else to love.’ On the other hand, the narcissistically lonely man seems to be saying, ‘I love myself dearly, as I did before and always; but there is no one around to love me, and no one to talk to and to tell how much I deserve this love of myself and by others; that is why I am so desperately lonely and hopeless.’

It is quite obvious that this sense of egotistic desolation has nothing in common with the solitude that the scientist seeks in the isolation of his laboratory. To be sure, the scientist withdraws into his retreat because he, too, temporarily loses his interest in the outside world; but this is a self-imposed withdrawal, not a true loss of interest. Moreover, while he withdraws from the world, he does so because he is intensely interested in a certain piece of work — in something which is not his own little self; also, as soon as his work is done, he comes back willingly and cheerfully to the outside world. Another point to note: the solitude he seeks is not to him something unpleasant imposed on him by circumstances, — that is, the outside, — not something discouraging, impoverishing his personality and belittling his selfrespect, but something welcome, comfortable, something that has in its store the enriching experience of creative work.

We can trace the whole gamut of these emotions of lonesomeness, mourning, and then solitude in the story of Robinson Crusoe; we are unable to find them in Bunin’s Gentleman from San Francisco, or Jack London’s Martin Eden, or in Richard Wagner, for that matter; or in Schopenhauer, in Tchaikovsky, or in Nietzsche, Guy de Maupassant, or even in Leo Tolstoy. These were lonely people — lonely no matter how successful, no matter how much surrounded by things and people. Theirs is a loneliness per se despite the many things they do; as a matter of fact, once their loneliness sets in they are overwhelmed by it, regardless of circumstances.

Unlike the lonesome, nostalgic person, or the one who seeks productive solitude, they seem to be unable to find anything that would quench the appetite of the inner worm which gnaws at their hearts. Travel and art (Wagner, Tchaikovsky), contemplation (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky), drinks, drugs, or a multitude of friends (Maupassant, Baudelaire) — nothing proves of any avail. They live in a thickly populated world, and they are unable to discover a single man Friday.

These extreme cases are chosen by way of more emphatic illustration; the affliction is not limited to great men — the number affected by it is limitless, and it includes not only great artists and thinkers, but also the moderately useful and the immoderately useless, mild and severe psychopaths and many incurably, mentally ill. It is an affliction both universal and multifarious in form, and it is particularly characteristic of certain aspects of romanticism and of the paradoxical age of to-day, which we dare not yet call romantic because we are still ashamed of it. We try to drown its essential meaning in the din of revolutionary explosions, the rattle of machine guns, and the roars of infuriated crowds — masses of human beings who don’t even know how lonely they are, applauding prostrate before ‘leaders,’ ready to let themselves be destroyed while uttering a variety of modern equivalents for Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutamus.

A puzzled query makes itself felt: What makes people so passively lonely? What makes them feel so lost among people and things? The sociological aspects of the problem are unusually complex and cannot be understood without deep psychological insight. No adequate answer to the question is possible without an inquiry into the individual reactions called loneliness.

III

At least two things must have become clear thus far: (1) loneliness is intimately related to man’s narcissism, and (2) narcissism carries with it more than a seed of malice, of hostility.

Let us examine both elements more clearly. The lonely individual seldom fails to display an ill-disguised or open hatred. The surliness of Schopenhauer was proverbial; the aggressive, stinging hatred which seethed in the heart of Nietzsche is obvious even to non-psychologists; the inflammable, combative spirit that was Don Quixote’s is well known. Even those great lonely men who felt inspired to teach what appeared to them true Christianity found it impossible to conceal fully their underlying egocentricily, and their uncommon ability to hate — the subsoil of their personalities. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, each in his way, illustrate the point clearly. Tolstoy was extremely domineering and selfish, and when he consciously felt justified he would release an inordinate amount of venom and contempt. Take, for instance, his abusive tirades against Wagner, Shakespeare, or Turgenev. Tolstoy preached charity, humility, and self-sacrificing kindness, yet he had difficulty in concealing his own essential megalomania. The same is true of Dostoyevsky, although his megalomania appeared under a more tragic, self-torturing guise, under the guise of a self-slapping Nietzsche.

There is nothing paradoxical about this; we will recall that true aggression, when expressed outward, will appear as hatred, combativeness, or murder, but when automatically turned inward it will appear as self-depreciation, depression, self-torture, or suicide. In certain severe mental diseases the patient’s inner megalomania also presents itself under these two seemingly self-contradictory aspects; one is the greatest and richest man in the world who demands subservience from those who surround him, while the other is the greatest sinner, the greatest criminal on earth, subservient to the world and beseeching that supreme punishment be meted out to him. Both these aspects may come to alternate expression in one and the same person.

Maupassant was a case in point. Ilis horrors, his fears, and his attempts at suicide were but a melancholic form of that state of mind which made him say that he heard the tree roots grow underground and that many Guy de Maupassants would come up to the surface and bloom forth. August Strindberg offered in many respects a similar psychological picture. So did certain characters of Ibsen: Hedda Gabler, for instance, with her uniquely depressive, ill-concealed, destructive hatred, tragic self-centredness, and eternal loneliness, which even expectant motherhood could not dispel.

We must repeat, these traits, so visible in the great and the very abnormal, are characteristic also of the humble and of the so-called normal of the same psychological species. Babbitt was lost in his simple world, unloving and loveless and lonely; he was given to outbursts of bitterness which sprang from the same psychological sources as the bitterness of a Tolstoy or a Nietzsche. Why he stayed a Babbitt instead of becoming a Christian or antichristian philosopher is another question that cannot be answered here.

This, then, is established: that the self-satisfying, prying spirit of the gossip presents at least the germinal form of that essential megalomania which bursts forth so openly in a Don Quixote or a Nietzsche— and that the malice of the gossip springs from the same roots as the tragic cruelty of a Hedda Gabler, or the bombastic venom of a Tolstoy.

We thus come upon a deeply seated psychological triad: narcissism, megalomania, and hostility. These three fundamental urges appear under a striking variety of aspects and combinations. Some are direct, unadulterated expressions of these primitive urges, while others are so modified and changed that they appear at first unrecognizable as to substance, and may even be cloaked under the guise of an opposite drive. The megalomanic Tolstoy walks barefooted in a rough peasant shirt and preaches humility; the cruel, sadistic Dostoyevsky leads a self-defeatist, selfdestructive life; the self-loving Don Quixote appears as the eternally idealistic, loyal lover; the cold, calculating, daredevilish, conceited, self-admiring Don Juan dances along the history of literature as the epitome of a great lover — which he fundamentally never was. Whatever the manifest or hidden form or combination of this essential triad, whatever its social, artistic, philosophic, or characterological performances, the inner substance of the individuals laboring under the heightened pressure of these drives is the same: some form of loneliness. They feel estranged from the real world; they feel alone, seeking something that they know not and never find.

The same question asserts itself, this time with ill-concealed annoyance, perhaps: How does this state of affairs come about? Where does it come from? Granted that modern psychology has developed a keen technique of discerning, observing, and describing all these elements which are not at first manifest; granted that these elements are what they are said to be; granted that they are operative in a Babbitt as well as in a Napoleon — what is their significance? What contribution does this knowledge represent to our understanding of man? What harm or what good does it do to the human being or to humanity as a whole ?

IV

First of all, let us look upon loneliness as a symptom — that is, an indication that something is not fully harmonious within the individual. Take the common headache. If it is a mild, transient, infrequently recurring headache, we do little or nothing about it; we forget it during the intervals when we feel well, and make the best of it when it recurs. A headache is not a disease in itself; it serves rather as a signal that something is wrong. The severity of it, or the frequency of its recurrence, usually causes us to suspect that we may be dealing with something more serious — with anything from indigestion or an early pneumonia to typhoid fever or a brain tumor. We then take stock of what we are enduring and undertake corresponding medical measures.

The same can be said of loneliness; it is more or less a universal affliction — mild or severe. However, the knowledge of the psychological elements which compose it enables us to understand whether we are dealing with a mild headache or a psychological typhoid fever, as it were. August Strindberg, for instance, was a very ill man. His extreme narcissism, his megalomania, and his inordinate inner hostility made him totally incapable of loving anybody fully and truly; hence his staggering failure to find a beloved and loving partner in life, despite his many tragic attempts to do so. His narcissism, gnawing deeper and deeper into his relationship with the outside world, finally resulted in an almost complete severance from the life of reality; he lived in a weird nonexistent world created by his own inflamed fantasies — the real world appeared to him empty; he was tortured by abnormal jealousy, persecutory fears, and an insane awareness that his life was to be destroyed. This typical paranoia, the most severe mental illness of the so-called narcissistic neuroses, or psychoses, was a direct result of the triad described above.

Modern psychiatry, mental hygiene, preventive psychiatry, and educational psychology have all greatly benefited by the knowledge of the existence of this triad; understanding it has given us a tool with which to detect and to observe, at least in some cases and circumstances, the given morbid combination, to assess its psychological potency early enough either to prevent or, by curative methods, to avoid more serious complications. For we must remember that only the very few in this world are capable of combining paranoia or depression with great artistic and philosophic achievements; almost none can combine it with true scientific performance, and entirely too many combine it with nothing at all except useless and morbid existence, or criminality.

But still we have our query unanswered: How does all this come about? To which we may well add a reproach and another question: And are you not making a mountain out of a molehill in deriving from such an innocent — no matter how unpleasant — pastime as loneliness so many morbid, truly frightening conditions? Moreover, how do you prevent or cure?

The last question is easiest to answer, because it is not going to be answered. The surgeon and the internist perform their medical duty when they apply the necessary remedies; they are not, or should not be, called upon to give their patients a complete course in surgery and medicine before practising their respective specialties. The psychiatrist can, and should, do no more and no less than his medico-surgical colleagues. It is a survival of our mediæval prejudices to believe that psychiatry is different from, and outside of, the realm of medicine, and that each and every layman can master the whole subject merely because it deals with human psychology and not physiology. The many attempts to popularize psychiatric technique (what the French call publications de vulgarisation), so numerous of recent years, added a great deal to the confusion of minds but very little to true practical knowledge.

As to making a mountain out of a molehill, let us remember that while not all of us develop colds, pneumonias, or other respiratory diseases from breathing the same contaminated dust, we must always take care that the dust be as little germ-laden as possible. Breathing the dust and gasoline fumes of our modern streets is a universal and seemingly innocuous, if unpleasant, thing, yet it is useful to know all our susceptibilities to disease, and not to forget that a number of afflictions come from the dust and some of the more serious impurities which it always carries. The same can be said of loneliness; it is a form of psychological dust which we breathe and rebreathe — ubiquitous, at once innocuous and dangerous, at once innocent and guilty of a multitude of human ills.

We shall now return to the first question, which we reserved to be answered last: How do loneliness and its elementary psychological triad come about?

V

The growth of man, from his inception to adulthood, is not limited to his physical and intellectual development. What is commonly called the spiritual side of man, or what in cold scientific language is known as the psychological aspect of man, — that is, the sum total of his instincts and emotions, — also undergoes considerable changes. These changes are different from physical growth and intellectual development; they are forms of adaptation. Our instincts to-day are probably as primitive as hundreds of thousands of years ago, but the way we adapt them to civilization has changed, and it is constantly, if very imperceptibly, changing to-day. We are no longer cannibals, but somewhere deep in our personality lie buried cannibalistic drives which under certain circumstances, like certain mental diseases, reappear in the form of corresponding fantasies, distorted symbolizations, or more direct expression. Under normal conditions our primitive drives in their primitive forms remain deeply buried within us, and cannot be retrieved. Thus, as long as there is life within us, we are unable to perceive certain things, regardless of intellectual effort.

Let us try an experiment. Let us imagine an absolutely empty room. With some effort we are able to conceive of an empty room — in an abstract way; we can also visualize a certain empty room, but if we are alert enough we shall notice that the room we visualize is not really empty: somewhere in a corner, near a window, outside a window, by a door, somewhere, we imagine ourselves present and watching the allegedly empty room. We are unable to exclude ourselves from the place; we are unable to ‘abolish’ ourselves, for as long as we are alive something within us refuses to disappear — even in vivid imagination. In the same way no one is truly able to imagine himself dead; even if one reaches the point of visualizing one’s own dead body, one will notice that, because of the same queer inability to rid one’s self of one’s self, one preserves one’s self, and somewhere from a corner — alive — one is watching one’s own dead self.

Here we have the inherent nucleus of man’s primitive inability to rid himself of his own animistic conception of himself as immortal, eternal; here we have the primitive narcissistic nucleus which we — regardless of our physical adulthood and intellectual maturity — carry within us, unobserved by others and unknown to ourselves. We‘know’emotionally that we are immortal; here is the germinal left-over of our primitive past, a seed of primitive megalomania that will never wilt away, and that is always capable of being reawakened and regalvanized as a potent philosophic fantasy of our own immortality. We thus seek to communicate with the dead, hear their voices coming from the beyond, and ‘see’ their ectoplasm. Note, in all this, man’s naïve inability to divest himself of his own precious body which he intellectually knows to be dust; we call all these questionable phenomena psychic, but we endow them with physical characteristics. This overvaluation of ourselves, in naïve and childish terms of purely physical existence, is a permanent force within us. It is borne within us, and is cultivated — automatically, unknown to us — from the moment we are born. We may therefore consider it an empirical, incontestable fact that something in man conceives of himself as eternal, though his reason and intellectual knowledge may prove the contrary to be true.

Let us watch some of these manifestations in a human infant. There the child lies in the crib, quiet, self-contained, serene and satisfied despite its precarious weakness, and despite a total dependence on others. Unaware and unappreciative of the support of the outside world, it perceives the need for food, and it is fed. The child need not toil or bother about living wages — all it has to do is to whimper, or to squirm for a moment; yet if it could think or talk it would be convinced that it is omnipotent, because it always gets what it wants when it wants it. Here is the seed of that which is stored away in the invisible recesses of the adult human psyche as a paradoxical conviction of our greatness and all-importance, of our essential megalomania.

Do we mean to say by this that the child is actually aware of its power, that it actually knows? This question is frequently asked in a tone of critical disbelief. No, we don’t mean that the child is aware of all this in the same way that adults are aware of things. Then what do we mean? The answer to this question was very aptly given by a great man on the eve of the eighteenth century — Locke — in reply to a similar skepticism voiced by a great man towards the middle of the seventeenth century — Descartes. Santayana summarizes this answer as follows: ‘Children were not born murmuring that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another; and an urchin knew that pain was caused by the parental slipper before he reflected philosophically that everything must have a cause.’

In other words, emotionally we know things long before we know them intellectually — long before we are able to put our reason to work and to translate our knowledge into articulate thoughts, or words. In this process of translation, reason is actually not the master we think it is, but rather the servant of our emotional knowledge. Thus when we say that infants know, we mean to say that they know emotionally and will continue to know even if reason is fully dormant, even if, when grown up, they happen to be unaware of what they keep on knowing.

Let us return to the crib where the omnipotent baby peacefully rules the world with serene mastery. It is alone mostly, if not only, when it is asleep. During its waking hours it is always observed by mother or nurse; it is played with, amused, taken care of, attended to, talked to, cuddled, and otherwise made to feel that the universe is ready to serve its pleasure. It learns the joy of being admired and loved, before it learns anything about the outside world. Deprivations, problems of various kinds, the business of getting bumped at the first efforts of walking — all this will come later. In the meantime it knows (emotionally) that everything is serene, and for a long time it will continue to know (emotionally) that it is always loved, always protected, always indulged; the baby is constantly vibrant with the delight of living. Here we have the quintessence of what later becomes a narcissistic orientation: a conviction that life is nothing else but being loved and admired — hence self-centredness, self-admiration, which are difficult to keep in abeyance in later life when adulthood asserts its allegiance to civilization.

Let us spend a little longer at the crib; a few weeks, a few months.

Now the infant is crying; it is good for it to cry for a while; it is good exercise for the lungs. Needless to say, some day, later on in adult life, when disturbed by a severe shock or loss, the man will ‘cry like a baby,’ not for the exercise of his lungs, but much in the same manner. Now, while in his crib, he also shows all the external earmarks of suffering; he twitches, he struggles with his little body and limbs; he does not like the impact of the outside world. Hold off feeding him for a few more minutes, let him ‘exercise’ a little longer; he continues to struggle, to kick. He wants food; he does not want to wait; the omnipotent serene master of a few minutes ago becomes suddenly transformed into a small, weak thing, lost in the wilds of an enormous world that is the crib. He is restless, unhappy, anxious, angry. The tragedy resolves itself, and the battle with, and for, life comes to a standstill with the first eager, aggressive suck of milk. The world is reconquered; it paid to squirm, cry, kick, and be angry.

Here is the nucleus of hostility, hatred, impotent aggression of the lonely and abandoned. Here is the beginning of that intolerant anger which some day civilization will have to subdue, or mental illness will discharge again into the open. And if we continue on from crib to nursery, and to the kindergarten, we can observe, scene by scene, the enactment of the story entitled ‘megalomania, narcissism, loneliness.’

It is therefore as interesting as it is impressive to note that the overprotected, overindulged, and therefore seemingly overhappy children develop not infrequently into lonely, depressed, selfcentred grownups who in the depth of their personalities unwittingly, but forcefully, crave to return to the good everproviding and ever-protecting mothers. Also those who were not permitted to make a gradual normal transition from satisfying infancy to adolescence, those who were taken out of the stage of being reared to be pushed too abruptly into the stage of being educated, may develop into petulant, hostile, lonely persons who seek to come back (psychologically) to the crib. Wagner, Maupassant, Strindberg — these and many others, and all victims of paranoia or depression, generally show an essential inner struggle in relation to their mothers and for the nirvana of the crib. They have never grown up along the emotional scale of adulthood, whether they have become great poets, philosophers, artists, or have been numbered among the mentally ill. They are all victims of too severe an arrest of emotional development, and therefore they are lonely — longing for a past which has been a wonderful present only for a fleeting moment.

This is the answer to the question: How does it all come about?

It is obvious that many more complex questions are aroused by this all too sketchy answer. What can education do to bring about a greater understanding of the important rôle the infantile leftovers play in the life of man? What can the psychiatrist do to prevent the hypertrophy of our childhood within our adult personality? What are the normal and abnormal quantities of these qualities in man? What is it that saves one person from disaster by making him a lyrical poet, and leads the other to disaster even through art and poetry? What are the creative and what are the disintegrating combinations of this triad: narcissism, megalomania, hostility?

These are questions, with many others, that are in the foreground of our present-day psychological studies.