Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

John Donne, ‘Meditation V. Solus Adest’, Devotions upon emergent occasions (1624).

Miserable distemper! not to see God in the light, and see him in the darke: …not to see, where we all see him, in the Congregation, and to see him with terror, in the Suburbs of despaire, in the solitary chamber.

John Donne, ‘Preached at Hanworth, to my Lord of Carlile, and his company, being the Earles of Northumberland, and Buckingham, &c. Aug. 25. 1622. Fifty Sermons, Wing D1862 (1649), 274.

But, O my Soule, the Graue is fearefull: It is a retired solitude and a place of silence, a place of filthie stinke[.]

Zacharie Boyd, The last battell of the soule in death, STC 3447 (1629), 1135.

Solitude is not much better than a grave[.]

Thomas Adams, A commentary or, exposition vpon the diuine second epistle generall, written by the blessed apostle St. Peter, STC 108 (1633), 1610.

Society is the life of our life, and solitarinesse is a very living buriall. I might here move a Problem, why men naturally in remote and silent retirements and solitudes finde a kinde of horror and affrightfulnesse?

William Ince, Lot’s little one. Or Meditations on Gen. 19. vers. 20, STC 14073 (1640), 96.

So as this is the summe, if a man be alone, he shall be in misery; and againe, if a man be in any misery hee shall be left alone: Solitude and misery being like water, and ice, the one mutually producing the other.

John Jackson, The true euangelical temper, Wing J76B (1641), 185.

That it is true indeed, that to Man, by nature, or as Man, that is, as soone as he is born, Solitude is an enemy[.]

Thomas Hobbes, Philosophicall rudiments concerning government and society, Wing H2253 (1651), 6.

We tend to think that the inability to be alone is a problem of modernity, one that technological distraction has made particularly acute: indeed, in a 2014 study people of all ages found it so distressing to sit in a room alone for 15 minutes—without their phones—that some chose to relieve the boredom and fear by giving themselves electric shocks.[1] But many of our seventeenth century ancestors were so averse to solitude that it was embedded in their language: the Catholic lexicographer John Bullokar defined solitude as ‘A desert place, a wildernesse’, and many writers used ‘solitude’ as a synonym of ‘desolation’, the absence of life, desertion by one’s allies.[2] ‘Solitariness’ was the—somewhat—more neutral term, but, as the quotations above illustrate, whatever words were used, for many being alone was not merely a state of loneliness, but a source of existential dread.

Such a terror of being along is perhaps not surprising at a time when life was intensely communal. Early modern architecture afforded very little privacy, even for the wealthy, and few people expected or desired it. At all levels of society the chambers of a house were shared, and were not designed to impede access: servants slept in their masters’ rooms, rooms were strung together rather than opening off corridors, and poorer families were crammed into small spaces, often with their animals. Closets were not oratories but rooms that could be locked, used to store valuables and foodstuffs and for confidential business, and, as a secondary use, for reading and devotion. Even as a multi-functional lockable space they were a luxury; only the elite could afford to have a room dedicated solely to individual prayer. Early modern people of course experienced time alone, at work or travelling, and those who sought solitude could find it outside, in gardens or fields, or in the watches of the night between first and second sleep, when the rest of the household was quiet. But for most people, most of the time, life was lived with others’ care and guidance, watchfulness and concern, in a way that is difficult for us to imagine. It is no surprise that solitude was equated with illness, misery and the grave, that it was an ‘enemy’ to human life, that it led naturally to ‘horror and affrightfulnesse’.

That horror of isolation was coupled with a fear of what the mind might imagine when alone: ‘those disordered motions, which accompany our sequestred imaginations’, as Sir Thomas Browne called them. This fear of thought itself was not confined to Protestants. Roman Catholicism had a long history of personal devotional practises, but these were contained and controlled by an infrastructure of convents and confessors and set forms of prayer, and there was still an anxiety about might happen if people began to think and pray outside of those boundaries. In sixteenth century Spain, for example, Teresa of Avila had to guard her writings very closely; merely promoting the concept of ‘mental prayer’ (prayer in one’s head, without set forms) was enough to attract the attention of the inquisition. The Jesuits helped to overcome this fear and to popularise more contemplative forms of devotion, publishing handbooks that were widely circulated and translated. But in England the suspicion of solitary devotion was fuelled and maintained by the rejection of monasticism and everything associated with it, which had become a kind of Protestant shibboleth by the seventeenth century. Solitude, and monastic solitude in particular, was a dangerous source of temptation and disordered thinking. The devil had chosen to tempt Jesus in the desert for a reason, as Joseph Hall warned:

Woe to him that is alone, for if he fall, there is not a second to lift him vp. Those that out of an affectation of holinesse seeke for solitude in rocks and caues of the deserts, doe no other than run into the mouth of the danger of tentation, whiles they thinke to auoid it.[3]

The paranoia of this position is apparent from the way it is applied to other Biblical stories that would not seem to us to have anything to do with solitude. Lot, who had remained chaste in the ‘professed filthinesse’ of Sodom, would not have committed incest if he had not been alone in the mountains. Judah would not have been unwittingly seduced by his daughter-in-law in the guise of a temple prostitute if he had not been alone on the road. David would not have spied on and plotted to abduct Bathsheba and murder her husband if he had not been alone on the roof of his house. The traditional view is that early modern Protestants were great advocates of Matthew 6.5 (‘enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret’), when in fact they saw the dangers of solitude everywhere. Writers that encouraged solitary prayer quenched any enthusiasm with warnings about temptation and lists of ways of preventing ‘Satans filthy imbracements’.[4] ‘It is good, no doubt,’ admitted the godly minister of St Mary’s, Dover,

sometimes to bee alone, that wee may haue conuenience for holy Soliloquies, but wee must know, they are not solitarie Groues, silent walkes, a desolate Cell, or melancholly Hermitage, which can shut our selues from our selues: shew mee that holy recluse, that mortified Anachorete, whose walls can keepe out cares, sinfull and tumultuous thoughts[.][5]

The influential London puritan John Downame’s A guide to godlynesse provides an example of how suspicion of solitude infected Protestant practical divinity. Although he includes a chapter ‘Of the duties which wee ought to performe, when we are solitary and alone’, Downame is extremely reluctant to encourage solitude even for the purposes of prayer. Being alone is an ‘accident’ of daily life that must be used for devout purposes lest it become the source of danger. The ‘duties’ are not steps in meditation, but methods to avoid sin:

• . Sect. 1 That when we are alone, we must not be idle and vnfruitfull.
• . Sect. 2 That we must spend our solitary houres in good exercises, shunning vaine thoughts and intertaining Christian meditations.
• . Sect. 3 That in our solitarinesse we must auoyde carnall concupiscence and the pleasures of sinne.
• . Sect. 4 That we must in our solitarinesse beware of sinfull actions and secret sinnes.
• . Sect. 5 That it is pleasant, profitable, and necessary to spend our solitary houres in Christian duties.

Even that last section about the ‘pleasant’ benefits of solitude is full of warnings to ‘keepe this watch ouer our thoughts, hearts, and actions, when we are solitary, because then we are more in danger to fall into sinne, and to become slothfull and negligent in all good duties’ and because alone ‘we are destitute of the helpe of our religious friends’, their guidance and watchful admonitions. It is the end of this chapter that leads to Downame’s warnings about Biblical figures who fell while alone: Eve, Joseph in Potipher’s house, Lot alone in the mountains with his daughters, David spying on Bathsheba, even Christ in the wilderness. ‘[W]ee are in our solitarinesse to watch most carefully ouer the purity of our soules,’ Downame warns, ‘because they are then most indangered to these spirituall rapes.’[6]

What underlies all this concern is an almost paranoid fear of not being watched: the vigillance of other Christians is what keeps us from falling into temptation. This paranoia finds its opposite in the following chapter, ‘What duties wee ought to performe when wee are in company’. Downame allows that ‘there is a fit time for solitarinesse,’ ‘yet we are not chiefly to affect it, much lesse to put such perfection in it, as to deuote our liues wholly vnto it[.]’ We are ‘to preferre ciuill conuersation before solitarinesse, and a life taken vp in vertuous action, before that which is spent in bare theorie and contemplations.’ It is in communal life that we can be examples to one another, ‘stirre vp Gods graces in one another, both by word and good example, helping to remooue impediments that lye in the way; and exhorting one another to cheerefulnesse in their iourney.’ The anxious tone of the previous chapter is transfigured; in ‘sweete society’ believers ‘hasten their speed towards the Kingdome of heauen’.[7]

The terror of solitude that is evident in Downame’s Guide and many other godly texts was balanced by a number of other influences, and in the seventeenth century an increasing number of Protestant writers began to concede that solitude, although dangerous, was probably necessary to the Christian life. Richard Rogers’ influential Seuen treatises on practical divinity (1603) features a chapter detailing ‘how we should behaue our selues in solitarinesse’ (376-84). Like Downame, Rogers spends considerable time warning against the ‘idle and vaine wandrings and fantasies’ that ‘swarme’ in the minds of most people when they are alone. But he also offers the examples of Cicero, Scipio and Cato, who valued their solitary meditations, and these pagan classical writers offered an example of stoic retreat from the world of the court, politics and business to a quieter life that was romanticised (and satirized) in pastoral literature.[8] Joseph Hall’s The arte of diuine meditation (STC 12642, 1606) introduced continental forms of meditation to Protestant readers, and guidebooks such as Daniel Featley’s Ancilla Pietatis (STC 10725, 1626) presented straightforward patterns of private prayer not unlike Catholic books of hours. But the ambivalence remained. Featley wrote his handbook while confined to his house by a non-infectious disease during an outbreak of plague; meditating on the emptiness of the church, ‘the danger and desolation of her solemnest assemblies’, Featley ‘fell into a serious consideration of the vse and most vrgent necessity of PRIVATE DEVOTION’ to reconnect believers to public worship. He dedicated his book to Katherine Manners, praising her piety but implying that she was in need of a Protestant form of prayer since she had renounced Catholicism to marry George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in 1620. (He was not wrong; she reverted to Catholicism shortly after Buckingham’s assassination in 1628). John Donne could call solitude ‘a torment which is not threatened in hell itself’ in the Devotions, but also keep a time of ‘solitarinesse and arraignment of my self’ in preparation for receiving the sacrament. In his time alone Donne ‘digested some meditations of mine, and apparelled them (as I use) in the form of a Sermon’, a reminder that writing was one solitary pursuit that seems to have caused far less panic for his contemporaries than thinking without the aid of pen and paper, without the interlocutor that writing imagines.[9]

Like many of his contemporaries, Donne was influenced by Roman Catholic models of prayer and meditation that were much more positive about the value of time spent alone. Classics of practical devotion by Luis de la Puente, Luis de Granada, Francis de Sales, Peter of Alcantara and others were translated into English in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and under the influence of Hall and others found their way into Protestant hands. Successive translations of one of these texts, the late medieval Devotio Moderna guide De Imitatione Christi (c. 1427), provide a final example of how suspicion of solitude left its trace in Protestant culture. The original includes a chapter ‘De amore solitudinis et silentii’, translated as ‘Of the loue of onlynes and scylence’ by the Roman Catholic Richard Whitford in 1535, ‘Of the loue of Solitude, and Silence’, by the Jesuit Anthony Hoskins in 1613, but ‘Of solitarines, and silence’ by the Protestant Thomas Rogers in 1580.[10] Rogers’ translation is subtly reforming, inserting scripture references that anchor the text in Protestant Biblical scholarship, and slightly altering the wording, as in the omission of ‘love’ in the title of chapter 20. For example, Rogers translates ‘Maximi Sanctorum humana consortia ubi poterant vitabant et Deo in secreto vivere eligebant’ as ‘after the example of the most godlie, who shunned the companie of men, as much as they might, and choase to liue apart vnto God.’ Rogers’s language evokes Senecan retirement from public life rather than outright solitude; ‘living apart’ in an early modern context could mean retreat to the country rather than seclusion. Hoskins’s translation is clearer, and much closer to the Latin: ‘The greatest Saints auoyded the company of men as much as they could, {{Heb. 3.}} and chose to liue to God in secret.’[11]

Hoskins also emphasises secrecy in a paragraph that describes solitary meditation as the only source of godly remorse:

5. Si vis corde tenus compungi, intra cubiculum tuum, et exclude tumultus mundi. Sicut scriptum est, In cubilibus vestris compungimini.

If thou desirest true contrition of hart, retire thy selfe into some secret and solitary place, and exclude from thy mind the tumultes, & vnquietnes of the world, as it is written: In your chambers be ye sory. {{Psal. 4.}}

Rogers, on the other hand, chooses the more neutral term ‘chamber’, more closely aligning the instruction with Jesus’s rules for praying in the gospel of Matthew:

the which thou shalt the more easilie attaine, if thou enter into thy chamber {{Matth. 6, 6.}}, and shut thy selfe from trobles of the worlde, as it is written {{Psalm. 4, 4.}}, Examine your owne hart vpon your bed, and be stil.

Rogers’s translation is closer to the Latin ‘cubiculum tuum’, but Hoskins’s ‘some secret and solitary place’ is much more explicitly solitary. ‘Chamber’ usually referred to a bedroom, and early modern beds and bedrooms were surprisingly communal places.[12]

Most telling is a slightly confusing passage about how the wonders of the world are ultimately unsatsifying:

Quid potes videre alicubi, quod die potest sub solem permanere. Credis te forsitan satiari, sed non poteris pertingere.

Hoskins renders this as

What is there any where to be seene that can long continue vnder the sunne? Thou thinkest perhaps to satiate thy selfe, & haue thy fill; but thou shalt neuer attaine it[.]

But Rogers turns this into a warning about too much thinking:

What seest thou in any place that abideth euer {{1. Cor. 7, verse. 31. 1. Iohn. 2, verse. 17.}}? Perchance thou thinkest to satisfie thy self with contemplation; but thou shalt neuer do so.

Rogers goes on to make the same point that the devout should ‘lift vp thine eies’ to God, rather than looking on earthly things, but the hint that ‘contemplation’ might be unsatisfying and even distracting is a reminder that fear of thought crept in even to this adaptation of a classic of Roman Catholic devotion.[13]

Many of my fellow early modernists would be startled to read these passages; we still tend to think of Protestants as those who are happy to enter into their closets. We cannot understand the evolution of Protestant devotion, and thus of early modern concepts of the self, until we take this suspicion of solitude into account. But this phenomenon has implications beyond histories of the reformation. It provides evidence of the long and deep-rooted history of the pathology of solitude, of the natural ‘horror and affrightfulnesse’ that many still feel at the prospect of time alone. It also problematises the questions at the heart of today’s seminar about inner presence and the inner voice, and changing perceptions of the source of that presence. Godly writers may warn of Satan’s ability to manipulate those who are alone, but the dangerous thoughts come from within, from the sinful nature of the individual, not an external spiritual force. The fear articulated here is fundamentally a fear of the unguarded, unwatched self: no solitary space is sufficiently holy to ‘shut our selues from our selues’.

Erica Longfellow is Dean of Divinity at New College, Oxford.

[1] Timothy J Wilson et al, ‘Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind’, Science 4 July 2014, pp. 75-77, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6192/75.full

[2] J[ohn] B[ullokar], An English expositor, STC 4083 (1616), 100; OED, ‘solitude, n.’, 2, 3, 4.

[3] Joseph Hall, The vvorks of Ioseph Hall Doctor in Diuinitie, STC 12635b (1625), 1192.

[4] John Downame, A guide to godlynesse or a Treatise of a Christian life, STC 7143 (1622), 302. Richard Rogers, Seuen treatises, STC 21215 (1603), 381.

[5] John Reading, Dauids soliloquie Containing many comforts for afflicted mindes. As they were deliuered in sundry sermons at Saint Maries in Douer, STC 20788 (1627), 181.

[6] [6] John Downame, A guide to godlynesse, 297, 299, 300, 301, 302.

[7] John Downame, A guide to godlynesse, 302, 303, 304.

[8] Richard Rogers, Seuen treatises, 384, 383.

[9] John Donne, ‘To my worthy friend F. H.’, Letters to severall persons of honour, Wing D1864 (1651), 228.

[10] Richard Whitford, trans., A boke newly translated out of Latyn in to Englisshe, called The folowing of Christe, STC 23964.7 (1535); Thomas Rogers, trans., Of the imitation of Christ, STC 23973 (1580); Anthony Hoskins, trans., The follovving of Christ Deuided into foure bookes, STC 23987 (Saint-Omer, 1613).

[11] Thomas Rogers, trans., Of the imitation of Christ, 41; Anthony Hoskins, trans., The follovving of Christ, 47.

[12] Anthony Hoskins, trans., The follovving of Christ, 49; Thomas Rogers, trans., Of the imitation of Christ, 42.

[13] Anthony Hoskins, trans., The follovving of Christ, 51; Thomas Rogers, trans., Of the imitation of Christ, 44.

The post Solitude and authenticity after the Reformation: or, Puritans out of the closet appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

The young man in Goya’s famous “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” is alone. With no one around to disturb him, he has fallen asleep while working at his desk. Yet, while this young man is in a state of solitude, he does not seem to be quite alone, for he is surrounded by the wonderful and terrifying products of his mind. Goya’s aquatint is accompanied by a short epigraphy, which reads “imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels (La fantasía abandonada de la razón produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella es madre de las artes y origen de las maravillas).” But how, exactly, can our imagination act in this way? And under what conditions? Would this young man’s imagination produce such impossible monsters had he not been alone? Could it be, then, that our imagination produces terrifying creatures not only when abandoned by reason but also when abandoned by other people?

It is commonly argued that Goya is expressing here the Enlightenment ideals of reason and rationality. Yet, the basic sentiment that motivates the “Sleep of Reason” and the idea that “imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters” is as old as the concept of imagination itself. It can be traced back to the earliest attempts to theorize the cognitive and epistemological roles of the imagination and it remains common throughout most of the history of philosophy, at least until the eighteenth century.

In this short essay, I would like to investigate this idea of the “Sleep of Reason” and of imagination’s capacity to produce impossible monsters when abandoned by reason. Turning to the history of philosophy and science, I am interested here in how philosophers, scientists, doctors, and theologians have thought about the nature of imagination, its relationship to reason, and its ability to radically depart from reality and produce wonderful, incredible, and terrifying images and appearances. Importantly, I seek not only to understand the effect that the abandonment of reason has on the imagination but also to explore this relationship between reason and imagination in the context of loneliness. I would like to ask why we are likelier to be “abandoned by reason” when we are alone, or why the imagination is prone to produce such terrifying images under the condition of solitude.

The first question, then, is why does the imagination, when abandoned by reason, produce impossible monsters? Throughout the history of philosophy and science, the first and most straightforward answer to this question is that the imagination, in itself, is fallible and prone to error. For Plato, the imagination (phantasia or eikasia) is the mental faculty that process the impressions of phantoms (phantasmata) or likenesses (eikones). The instability and fallibility of this faculty are tied both to the imperfection of our senses—on which it depends—and to the inherent and natural instability and imperfection of the objects of sensual perception.[1] Aristotle had a broader—and significantly more influential—understanding of the cognitive and epistemological roles of imagination. For him, the imagination (phantasia) is present in nearly all mental activity: from processing sensual input and providing the foundation for abstract thinking to motivating any kind of animal movement and a broad range of emotions. Yet, unlike the so-called ‘proper senses’ or reason, phantasia could be either right or wrong and is often associated by Aristotle with dreams, hallucinations, and error more generally.[2]

The imagination is not unique to humans. In fact, many animals are guided and “live by” this faculty.[3] Yet humans, according to a common argument, are distinguished from animals by the presence of reason in their soul or mind and by its simultaneous operation with the imagination. Gregor Reisch expressed this idea in his 1503 Margarita Philosophica, arguing that “in man this power [phantasia] is adorned with reason” whereas “in brutes, by contrast, the phantasy is ruled by the instinct of nature.”[4] Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola similarly held that “he who lacks reason, then, is not man, but rather a brute to be dragged hither and thither at the beck of the imagination.”[5] And Robert Burton argued in his 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy that “in man it [imagination] is subject and governed by reason, or at least should be; but in brutes it hath no superior, and is ratio brutorum, all the reason they have.”[6]

While humans are aided and guided by reason, the imagination remains a potential source of error and confusion in their souls. The imagination, Pico explains, “is for the most part vain and wandering.”[7] Expressing a nearly identical sentiment to the one grounding Goya’s much later epigraphy, he concludes that “granted that imagination is necessary; nevertheless it is irrational and devoid of correct judgment, unless aided by the guidance of a superior power. Hearkening to this, imagination beatifies man; disobedient to it, imagination dooms him.”[8] Beyond basic perceptual errors and optical illusions, the imagination can produce wonderful and terrifying images. According to Burton, for example, “although this fantasy of ours be subordinate faculty to reason, and should be ruled by it, yet in many men, through inward or outward distemperatuers, defects of organs, which are unapt, or otherwise contaminated, it is likewise unapt, or hindered, and hurt.”[9] In the melancholic man, “this faculty [imagination] is most powerful and strong, and often hurts, producing many monstrous and prodigious things, especially if it be stirred up by some terrible object, presented to it from common sense or memory.”[10] Similarly, Reisch concludes that “sometimes, from the composition of different species of intentions it [imagination] makes monsters, the like of which it has sometimes not seen before.”[11]

We now, then, have a clearer sense of why the imagination, when unguided and unaided by reason, may produce terrifying images and terrible monsters. The imagination is tied to our senses and is responsible for processing various sensual inputs into mental representations. These representations are later stored in the memory and used by our intellect and can be brought back to mind independently of the original thing that caused them. However, the imagination, in itself, is irrational (or, more accurately, pre-rational). Guided by reason, it plays an important role in human epistemology and cognition. Abandoned by it, it may act freely, combining past impressions into absurd and impossible mental representations, including images of monsters and other terrifying creatures.

Having briefly established the reasons behind imagination’s capacity to produce such terrifying images, we may now further inquire into the claim that it is more prone to do so under conditions of solitude. Why, then, is the imagination likelier to be “abandoned” by reason when we are alone? One potential starting point for such an investigation is the state of sleep, which represents a paradigmatic case of the solitary abandonment of reason. “In time of sleep,” explains Burton, “this faculty [imagination] is free, and many times conceives strange, stupend, absurd shapes.” In sleep, he further argues, “the fantasy alone is free, and his commander reason; as appears by those imaginary dreams, which are of divers kinds, natural, divine, demonically, &c.”[12] Therefore, “this we see verified in sleepers, which by reason of humors and concourse of vapors troubling the fantasy, imagine many times absurd and prodigious things.”[13]

Although sleep provides us with the paradigmatic example of the wonderful things created by a free imagination under conditions of solitude, such effects can be found in waking humans as well. Reisch, for example, explains that “the working of this power [imagination] […] are not absent from people awake.”[14] Burton also holds that “the like effects almost are to be seen in such as are awaken; how many chimeras, antics, golden mountains and castles in the air do they build unto themselves?”[15] According to him, fear can stimulate such effects. As he explains, “fear makes our imagination conceive what is list, invites the devil to come to us […] and tyrannizeth over our fantasy more than all other affections, especially in the dark.” And, he concludes, “’tis strange what women and children will conceive unto themselves, if they go over a churchyard in the night, lie, or be alone in a dark room, how they sweat and tremble on a sudden.”[16] Indeed, this sentiment has a long history: it was already expressed by Plato, who was concerned with how “mothers under the influence of such poets terrify their children with harmful tales (μύθους κακῶς), how that there are certain gods whose apparitions haunt the night in the likeness of many strangers from all manner of lands.”[17] And Hobbes, Burton’s contemporary, held that “even they that be perfectly awake, if they be timorous, and superstitious, possessed with fearful tales, and alone in the dark, are subject to the like fancies, and believe they see spirits and dead mens Ghosts walking in Church-yards.”[18]

It is quite clear why the solitude of sleep allows for the imagination to be “abandoned by reason.” During sleep, our senses are inactive. In the absence of new sensual input, the imagination is free to recreate previous sensual impressions without being disturbed by new stimuli. At the same time, it is commonly assumed that reason, too, is inactive during sleep. Unconstraint by the senses or reason, the imagination is entirely free during sleep and thus able to produce impossible and wonderful images. But why should our imagination produce such terrifying monsters when we are alone and awake? Since both our senses and reason are fully active, we should expect our imagination to operate ‘normally’ under these conditions. Yet, as we saw above, philosophers from Plato to Hobbes assumed that when people are “alone in the dark” they may experience very similar things to those found during sleep, despite being fully awake.

To see why solitude can cause this “abandonment of reason” and facilitate the creation of such terrifying monsters by our imagination we should recognize that our imagination is one of the primary causes of subjectivity and difference in opinion among humans. As Pico explains, for example, the imagination is “the source of the shining, the manifold, differences in opinion.”[19] Unlike our senses and reason—which are considered to be rather stable and similar across individuals—our imagination tends to be highly subjective. It is both prone to error and depends on our individual physiology,[20] which means that different individuals are likely to have different “imaginative” experiences.

When we are with other people, we can communicate and share our experiences to distinguish between the “imaginary” and the “real.” We can ask “did you see this?” “Did you hear that?” “Am I imagining, or did [X] just happen?” Through the presence of others, we can stabilize our imagination, “normalize” it in accordance with the experiences of others around us and thus become confident that the things we see, hear, and experience are “real” and not just “in our minds.” We are unable to do so when we are alone. Even though we are perfectly awake, our reason does not always provide a sufficient constraint on our imagination. It still requires the presence of others in order for us to confirm certain things as “real” and rule out other experiences as “imaginary.”[21] The imagination, then, produces “terrible monsters” not only when abandoned by reason. It may do so also when we are abandoned by other people—when we are alone.

I would like to conclude this brief investigation by considering the political implications of these claims about the human imagination. The idea that “imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters” has posed a challenge to political thinkers, from Plato to Hobbes. One of their primary concerns was that humans possessed by such imaginative fears are much likelier to become the targets and victims of vicious and ambitious individuals—particularly religious leaders who seek to gain influence and undermine the civil sovereign. Burton, for example, argues that “for the most part by threats, terrors, and affrights, they [evil priests and other bad men] tyrannize and terrify their distressed souls; knowing that fear alone is the sole and only means to keep men in obedience.”[22] Hobbes expressed this concern even more clearly. According to him, “if this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civil Obedience.”[23]

The political problem expressed in these and many other texts can be formulated as follows: the imagination is an unchangeable fact of the human soul. It plays crucial cognitive and epistemological roles and is necessary for nearly all mental activity—from sensual perception to abstract thought. At the same time, the imagination is prone to error and highly subjective. When it is abandoned by reason—for example, when we are asleep or alone in the dark—it can produce wonderful and absurd images and appearances, including terrible and terrifying monsters. These images and appearances, in turn, can be used and manipulated by clever and ambitious individuals who seek to obtain power and control. For Plato, this threat is represented by the poets who, for example, persuade mothers to terrify their children with “bad stories” (μύθους κακῶς) that reinforce false and harmful beliefs.[24] For Hobbes, it is represented by religious figures—and above all prophets—who take advantage of the fears of the common people to undermine the power of the sovereign and establish themselves as an alternative source of authority. This, according to Hobbes, is a major cause of civic unrest and political instability. As he explains in Leviathan, “if men were at liberty, to take for Gods Commandments, their own dreams, and fancies, or the dreams and fancies of private men; scarce two men would agree upon what is Gods Commandment; and yet in respect of them, every man would despise the Commandments of the Common-wealth.”^[25]

How did thinkers like Plato and Hobbes solve this problem? While an attempt to fully explore such solutions goes well beyond the scope of this essay, we may briefly sketch its outline here. As we have seen, the imagination is likelier to produce terrible monsters and terrifying images when one is alone. When we are with others, we are better able to “normalize” or “standardize” our imagination so that we may distinguish the “imaginary” from the “real.” If we “normalize” or “standardize” our imagination, and if we could thus remove the subjective fear of solitary individuals, we may be able to make these individuals less vulnerable to the abuses of priests, prophets, and other ambitious persons, and thus secure order and stability. This seems to be what Plato has in mind, for example, when he defines bravery in the ideal city as the “quality that under all conditions will preserve the conviction that things to be feared (τὴν περὶ τῶν δεινῶν δόξαν) are precisely those which and such as the lawgiver inculcated in their education.”[26] And, above all, this idea seems to be motivating the powerful Hobbesian image of the Leviathan. “The great power of his governor,” he explains, “whom I compared to Leviathan, taking that comparison out of the two last verses of the one-and-fortieth of Job; where God, having set forth the great power of Leviathan, calleth him king of the proud. ‘There is nothing,’ saith he, ‘on earth to be compared with him. He is made so as not to be afraid. He seeth every high thing below him; and is king of all the children of pride.’”[27]

Like the Platonic lawgiver, the Hobbesian sovereign will not eliminate individual fear. Instead, both will seek to establish the “correct” objects of fear across individual subjects, thereby “normalizing” and stabilizing the subjects’ imagination, even in the absence of other people around them. Once the lawgiver or sovereign has determined the “incorrect” objects of fear—for example, by ruling out spirits and ghosts as “absurd” and “impossible,” as in the case of the Hobbesian sovereign—their subjects become less prone to the abuses of crafty and ambitious individuals who might take advantage of such imaginative experiences. At the same time, this lawgiver or sovereign will determine the “correct” objects of fear to be shared by their subjects. Thus, in Hobbes’s case, the subjects will be freed of the “erroneous” individual monsters produced by their solitary imagination. But instead, they will now come to share in a collective fear, imagining together one single monster—the mighty and all-powerful Leviathan.

[1] For example, Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 510d–11.
[2] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. R.D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1907), 428a6-20.
[3] Aristotle, De Motu Animalium, ed. and trans. Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 700b15-20.
[4] Gregor Reisch, Natural Philosophy Epitomized: A Translation of Books 8-11 of Gregor Reisch’s Philosophical Pearl (1503), trans. Andrew Cunningham and Sachiko Kusukawa (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), Book X, 2.23.
[5] Giafrancesco Pico della Mirandola, On the Imagination, trans. Harry Caplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 78.
[6] Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), 212.
[7] Pico, On the Imagination, 29.
[8] Ibid., 43.
[9] Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 336.
[10] Ibid., 213.
[11] Reisch, Margarita Philosophica, Book X, 2.23.
[12] Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 213.
[13] Ibid., 337.
[14] Reisch, Margarita Philosophica, Book X, 2.23.
[15] Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 337.
[16] Ibid., 348–49.
[17] Plato, Republic, 380d.
[18] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), 2, 78.
[19] Pico, On the Imagination, 47.
[20] As we saw, Burton held that “through inward or outward distemperatuers, defects of organs, which are unapt, or otherwise contaminated, it [imagination] is likewise unapt, or hindered, and hurt.” Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 336.
[21] Indeed, Hobbes seems to reflect a similar sentiment in his discussion of language. Words, according to him, produce “signs” and “marks,” which can be used to stabilize the products of our imagination and allow for communication across different individuals. For example, Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 35.
[22] Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 385.
[23] Hobbes, Leviathan, 2, 34.
[24] Plato, Republic, 380d.
[25] Hobbes, Leviathan, 26, 446.
[26] Plato, Republic, 429b.
[27] Hobbes, Leviathan, 28, 496.

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We all have an inner voice which we correspond with and which we alone can hear. Perhaps some of us engage in such self-address more frequently and consciously than others, but this experience is something that will be familiar to everyone. Indeed, it may sometimes even be difficult to silence our inner voice, especially if it is saying something we don’t particularly want to hear, or which could be potentially harmful to our mental and physical wellbeing. To paraphrase Denise Riley’s comments from Episode 8 of the ‘Spaces of Solitude’ podcast, we have eyelids that enable us to close our eyes, but no ‘earlids’ that perform the corresponding function, leaving us with no way to stop listening to our inner voices. We are thus often enjoined to address ourselves more compassionately and patiently—a familiar dictum to help regulate negative self-speech is to ‘talk to yourself the way you would talk to your best friend’. At other times, our inner voice can help us to better understand what we are feeling or piece out what we ought to do in a tricky situation, something self-help books pick up on when they promise to unlock ways for us to harness ‘the hidden power of our inner voice […] to live a healthier, more satisfying, and more productive life’.[1]

I have recently become very interested in literary representations of such moments of selfaddress, where characters speak to themselves to resolve dilemmas, figure out their next course of action, or simply as a means of articulating their emotions. Such moments occur frequently in prose fiction works of the English Renaissance, to an extent where they may even be considered a distinctive motif of this genre. In what follows, I outline a rough sketch of a new project I am developing, which aims to explore such articulate moments of solitude and interiority in these works, paying special attention to the rhetorical strategies writers employed in the construction of such passages, how this motif interacts with modes of self-address in other genres, and their effects on the reader.

***

Mary Wroth’s work of prose fiction, Urania (1621), opens with the eponymous heroine in a meadow with her flock, on a fair day when ‘the Spring began to appeare like the welcome messenger of Summer’.[2] Despite the beautiful weather, all is not as tranquil as it seems, for Urania is in a considerable state of distress. Having recently learnt that she is not who she thinks she is, Urania begins to address herself about her newfound ignorance of her ‘owne estate or birth’ and the emotional turmoil that this causes.[3] Having discovered that she is not, as she believed, ‘a Sheperdes, and Daughter to a Shepherd’, Urania is ‘perplexed’ and ‘[m]iserable’, and professes to be in a state worse than her lambs, for ‘they know their dams, while thou dost live unknowne of any’.[4] Strikingly, in this time of distress and upheaval, Urania desires to be alone. Seeing ‘others come into that Meade with their flocks’ and ‘esteeming her sorrowing thoughts her best and choycest company’, Urania retreats from the presence of others, and continues to speak to herself more extensively in solitude, reflecting on her misery in the form of a sonnet:[5]

Unseene, unknowne, I here alone complaine

To Rocks, to Hills, to Meadowes, and to Springs,

Which can no helpe returne to ease my paine,

But back my sorrowes the sad Eccho brings.

Thus still increasing are my woes to me,

Doubly resounded by that monefull voice,

Which seemes to second me in miserie,

And answere gives like friend of mine owne choice.

Thus onely she doth my companion prove,

The others silently doe offer ease:

But those that grieve, a grieving note doe love;

Pleasures to dying eies bring but disease:

And such am I, who daily ending live,

Wayling a state which can no comfort give.[6]

In her inconsolable state, Urania speaks aloud to find her sadness doubled back to her by the natural landscape. Although she is ostensibly alone, the ‘Eccho’ invoked in Urania’s self-addressed poem points to a complex layering of reflexivity. The echo is not only Urania’s own voice, but also the mythological Echo of Ovidian origins.[7] As the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses goes, Echo is a mountain nymph who incurs the wrath of Juno and is punished by the goddess, who takes away Echo’s ability to speak her own thoughts aloud, dooming her to repeat the words of others (‘Yet Echo of the former talke doth double oft the ende / And backe again with just report the wordes earst spoken sende’).[8] This, as one might expect, leads to tragic consequences: when Echo falls in love with the beautiful youth Narcissus, she is unable to communicate properly with him and her advances are rejected, causing her to retreat into ‘dennes and hollow Caves’, where she eventually wastes away pining for him.[9] While her bones ‘were turned to stones’, her ‘voyce yet still remaynes’, disembodied and yet permanently part of the physical landscape:

From thence she lurking still

In woods, will never shewe hir head in field nor yet on hill.

Yet is she heard of every man: it is hir onely sound,

And nothing else that doth remayne alive above the ground.[10]

One does not necessarily have to be alone nor in emotional distress to hear Echo (or an echo), but with Ovid’s account of this story, such a (re)vocalisation of one’s voice comes to be associated with these states, as Urania experiences at the beginning of Wroth’s work of prose fiction. In speaking to herself alone, Urania thus generates and occupies multiple selves: she is both the speaker and auditor of her complaint, which is ‘doubly resounded’ in her own voice carried back to her by the natural landscape, figured as a friend in the mythological figure of Echo.[11]

Other examples of self-address (either verbal or mental) abound in numerous prose fiction works of the English Renaissance. Characters in this genre frequently address themselves in lengthy discussions, to an extent where such passages eclipse or even halt the development of narrative action. For example, barely a few pages into Thomas Lodge’s Forbonius and Prisceria (1584), the titular characters begin to speak to themselves on the nature of their romantic relationship and the factors that keep them apart, with the narrative perspective switching back and forth between such passages for some considerable length.[12] Elsewhere, in Robert Greene’s Mamilla (1593), the eponymous heroine contemplates how she ought to treat the object of her affections, Pharicles, by entering ‘with her selfe into [a] meditation’, employing a range of rhetorical strategies such as the invocation of exempla and sententiae to assess his constancy.[13] In Greene’s other work of prose fiction, Pandosto (1588, then various editions), a variety of characters similarly undertake such forms of self-address in the face of moral uncertainty. For instance, when the cupbearer Franion is commanded by his king Pandosto to poison another monarch, Franion, ‘being secret in his chamber’, considers this act of treason and how its execution would affect his conscience.[14] Later in the narrative, when Pandosto imprisons Fawnia’s beloved Doratus and demands that she become his concubine, Fawnia frets over the choice between her virtue and the safety of Doratus: ‘being alone by her selfe, [she] began to enter into these solitarie meditations’ on her plight.[15]

As these examples show, characters in prose fiction speak to themselves frequently in different forms, considering a wide range of moral and political issues that resonated with early modern readers. However, despite the striking presence of this motif in works of prose fiction, scholarship on forms of self-address in English Renaissance literature have mainly focused on dramatic soliloquies (as indeed my own work has done), and studies of it in non-dramatic genres are few and far between. The project I am conceptualising thus aims to be the first account of this motif across prose fiction works of the English Renaissance. It begins in the 1570s, when writers such as Philip Sidney and Robert Greene began experimenting with the form, and closes in the early 1620s with Wroth’s Urania, the first published work of prose fiction by a female writer. In examining the rhetoric and poetics of such moments of solitary debate, contemplation, and reflection, I hope to accomplish several aims and objectives. Firstly, I plan to explore how such passages drew on classical and Renaissance rhetorical strategies in the way they are structured and constructed. These rhetorical strategies were outwardly oriented in the sense that students were taught to speak and write for the purposes of persuading others through forms such as parliamentary speeches, sermons, pamphlets, and the like. However, authors in this period frequently turned such strategies inward in their writing, creating for readers and audiences the effect/illusion of a rich interior life (one thinks, for example, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, his soliloquies, and the way the character has been read throughout its critical history). By exploring the mix of interiority and exteriority presented by a rhetorical situation where one is both speaker and auditor, this work explores how the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ speech is complicated in the process of solitary self-address.

The project’s next objective is to contextualise the moral and political questions that characters are grappling with. It will reconstruct what is at stake for these characters by reading passages of selfaddressed speech alongside contemporary works of moral and political philosophy, thereby providing an in-depth account of the questions that works of prose fiction are engaging with. The project will also track intertextual relationships between self-address in prose fiction and other genres where considerable (solitary) introspection and reflection also takes place. These include dramatic set speeches, forms of religious meditations, and autobiographical writing.[16] By analysing the overlaps these works share in their interrogation of the self, the project hopes to articulate new connections between such meditative and reflective practices and imaginative literary production. Lastly, this project is not only interested in situating this distinctive motif in its intellectual and cultural moment, but also in the larger trajectory of how interiority has been represented in literatures across time, from ancient Greek poetry to the psychological realism of the modern novel. Works from The Odyssey to James Joyce’s Ulysses feature characters addressing themselves in a variety of situations, and I am interested in tracking continuities and differences (much of all this, of course, is far out of my area of expertise, and I hope to engage with colleagues working on such themes).

By examining how early modern writers of prose fiction depicted the resolution of contentious questions in their literary works, I not only hope to contribute to the fields of literary studies and intellectual history, but perhaps also demonstrate the relevance of early modern literature to our present concerns. It can be difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel during these trying times, when the emergence of new variants every so often threaten any attempt to return to ‘normal’ (whatever that ‘normal’ might be) and governments scramble to curb the spread of the virus by mandating restrictions on movement and social gatherings. Civic-minded, responsible, and lawabiding individuals may find themselves increasingly isolated from each other and in conversation with themselves more frequently than before. This was certainly my own experience, having relocated for a job far away from my network of friends and family in a country which adopted stringent lockdown measures. While technology offered valuable opportunities for me to stay connected with others, I found myself in conversation with myself more than usual, especially when faced with difficult and life-changing decisions. A study of self-address in prose fiction works of the English Renaissance therefore affords many significant parallels with our current conditions, and we may have much to learn from how early modern writers depicted ways of (productively) grappling with questions of moral and political significance on one’s own and in the physical absence of other interlocutors.[17]

This research could also prove highly relevant to the current communicative landscape. In recent times, public discourse seems to have become increasingly polarised, fragmenting into a multiplicity of opinions in a way that excludes consensus. While technology helps us to maintain social contact in a time of physical isolation, it has also contributed significantly to the creation of paradoxically isolating ideological silos, where individuals and groups talk only to themselves (by which I mean those who already share the same beliefs), leading to increasingly solipsistic visions of the world. In studying how prose fiction depicts characters thinking through issues of personal and public significance, this project demonstrates how early modern literary texts could provide strategies of rhetorical argumentation that may be useful for building consensus. In depicting a wide spectrum of characters thinking through varied issues of personal and public significance, passages of self-address in English Renaissance prose fiction constitute an important exploration of interiority that is not solipsistic but emerges from dialogical self-debate. In its depictions of how and why characters come to take out different moral and political positions, such passages may have the potential to cultivate an ability to think from a multiplicity of viewpoints. By recovering historical and literary representations of self-addressed speech, this research highlights real and fictional precedents to demonstrate that we are less alone than we realise, even when talking to ourselves.

[1] I am quoting the synopsis of Ethan Kross’s Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It (2021). Of possible interest is Charles Fernyhough’s The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk To Ourselves (2016).

[2] Mary Wroth, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (London, 1612), sig. Br.

[3] Wroth, Urania, sig. Br.

[4] Wroth, Urania, sig. Br.

[5] Wroth, Urania, sig. Br.

[6] Wroth, Urania, sig. Br.

[7] As Ross Lerner, ‘“Doubly Resounded”: Narcissus and Echo in Petrarch, Donne, and Wroth’, Modern Philology 118 (2020), 177 points out, this reference serves as the ‘organizing technique of the verse’ through ‘repetitions in diction, anaphoric iterations, and constellations of assonance on the ō that ends Echo’s name’, in words such as ‘alone’, ‘Meadows’, ‘sorrowes’, ‘woes’, and ‘monefull’.

[8] Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1567), lines 459-60.

[9] Ovid, Metamorphoses, line 491.

[10] Ovid, Metamorphoses, lines 496-500.

[11] C.f. the Ciceronian and early modern trope that ‘a friend is another self’; the (modern) notion that our inner voice should be ‘friendly’.

[12] Interestingly, Forbonius also sings a sonnet—seemingly alone—in which he speaks of his ‘mournfull mone’ and invokes Echo. See Thomas Lodge, An alarum against usurers […] Heereunto are annexed the delectable historie of Forbonius and Prisceria (London, 1584). Such shared images, metaphors, and tropes is of great interest/relevance to the project.

[13] Robert Greene, Mamillia: A mirrour or looking-glasse for the ladies of Englande (London, 1583), sig. B3v.

[14] Robert Greene, Pandosto the Triumph of Time (London, 1595), sigs Br-v. This passage appears to be an addition to this later edition of the text.

[15] Greene, Pandosto, sig. Gr. Unbeknownst to both, Fawnia is Pandosto’s long lost daughter…

[16] The latter two coincide, for instance, in texts such as Puritan ‘self-examination’ diaries, which have yet to be read alongside forms of self-address in prose fiction

[17] Characters may of course deceive or mislead themselves, persuade themselves to engage in morally questionable deeds, or also engage in what might be thought of as ‘negative self-talk’, all of which may also provide interesting and useful parallels worth examining further.

Vanessa Lim (@vanessaolim) is Assistant Professor in the English Literature and Language department at Seoul National University.

The post ‘With herself into a meditation’: Self-Address in Early Modern English Literature appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine

-Samuel Beckett, ‘Company’ (1979)[1]

We do not regard our knowledge about affects as very assured either; it is a first attempt at finding our bearings in this obscure region.

-Sigmund Freud, ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis’ (1920)[2]

I.

In what language does solitude talk? If literature is the greatest authority on the history of voices, then it allows us to hear – perhaps greater than any other medium how we talk to ourselves: the sound of being alone, and of conjuring up another – referentially or fantastically – as the precondition of thought. Lyric has a particular purchase on this sense of solitariness insofar as it presumes a first-person speaker who is resolutely alone with themselves – though an aloneness that is predicated on an internal interlocutor: on the imagined presence of another, listening in. In Denise Riley’s Say Something Back (2016), lyric strains to hear the interlocutor that can no longer be found, to make an impossible encounter, which is one way to think about grief – or loneliness – or the grief of loneliness (about, in Melanie Klein’s terms, the nostalgic yearning for a perfect bond – the unconscious bond between mother and child – that no longer exists), which can only exist as a fantasy (a desire against the odds):[3]

Dun blur of this evening’s lurch to
Eventual navy night. Yet another
Night, day, night, over and over.
I so want to join you.[4]

Lyric address is, in the stasis of grief, truncated, repetitive. The loneliness of grief renders the promise of lyric speech futile: to whom exactly does it speak if the other is no longer there? In the poem, the speaker strains to hear what she wants to say; to find a language that might approximate the feeling of arrested time. If grief is speechless, solitude is often dull and inadequate; like lyric, it is awkward and self-protective, inching away from what it often looks like: solipsism, narcissism. In her essay ‘The Hermit’s Scream’, Adrienne Rich writes that poetry provides a language to break the circuit of the lonely subject forced to attend interminably to its own echo.[5]

In reading, we do not, I think, so much escape from our loneliness as produce a kind of solitude: we become attuned to our own internal thoughts as we overhear the thoughts of another; occasionally, when our minds are occupied, our internal thoughts – or speech – interrupt our reading; we might say that we are at such moments hearing words but not exactly listening. One is reminded of Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy (1936), which was written in a state of exile and loneliness, during his stay in London in the 1930s which he arrived at in 1933 in order to undertake analysis at the Tavistock Clinic with Wilfred Bion, then a trainee therapist. Murphy would be an interruption of Beckett’s own psychoanalysis: he arrived in the capital in the state of depression that followed the death of his father, and the symbolic death of Joyce (who had cut him off over Beckett’s affair with his daughter Lucia). The transitory uprooted city life that is represented in the novel opens with an image of its protagonist naked in his rocking-chair ‘curtained off from the sun’, a posture that we are told gives his body pleasure and frees his mind.[6] Solitude is held at bay – as it is Riley’s work – through the awkwardness of comedy; through experiments in darkness. ‘For the first time’, Bion writes, reflecting on the successful psychoanalysis of a schizophrenic patient, ‘it seemed possible that a day might come when the patient would show a sense of humour’.[7] The inner most state of consciousness – the place one makes loneliness audible – in Beckett’s work, unlike Joyce’s, is not the internal babble of consciousness but a dissociative – schizophrenic – distinction between the mind and the body: as if one could arrive at a place outside the mind, could speak without a voice.

II.

Solitude has taken a virtual turn of late, as if the promise of an encounter (and we might add of care) in the covid-19 pandemic were reduced to states of virtuality, of fantasy. How, we might reasonably ask, does the work of relationality that is so crucial to object relations psychoanalysis work in the online world? Hannah Zeavin has written a persuasive critique of the idea, held by many psychodynamic clinicians, that dislocated, or disembodied, therapy is an inferior form of treatment. She uses the metaphor of distance – as opposed to absence – to make the case for the usefulness of mediated treatment, which, she shows, is as old as the talking cure itself.[8] A voice can still be heard on the other end of the teletherapeutic line. But one might nonetheless wonder about the effects of the lack of full-embodied presence when it has been so crucial to the process of transference that takes place within the psychoanalytic setting; one might wonder whether listening online our presence is anything but a square rectangle, a hologram of a person, a ‘voice murmuring trace’ – as Beckett writes in ‘Texts for Nothing’ (1966): something that we are compelled to hear, which gives the illusion of conversation, the fantasy of an encounter.[9]

III.

The infrequency of writing on the subject of loneliness in Freud’s work might lead one to presume it not to be an emotion that interested him much at all: a mere byproduct of other psychopathologies that lead one to dissociate from others; as a defense mechanism for ideas that have not been worked through. But loneliness is an emotion that one finds conspicuously in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess. ‘When I see your handwriting again, those are moments of great joy, which allow me to forget much of my loneliness and privation’, Freud writes to Fliess five days after the birth of his daughter Anna (one cannot help but presume a certain jealousy of attention – of femininity; an ambivalence about his role as head of the family).[10] Letters conjure up the illusion of presence – a sense of embodiment – that provide a counterpoint to loneliness as the default state of inventing the history of psychoanalysis. Two years later Freud writes of how a visit from Fliess’s wife Ida brought ‘the short-lived illusion of all of us being happily together and taking it away again with her departure’ – a presence that Freud frames as ‘interruptions of loneliness’ which ‘have a salutary effect by reminding us how difficult renunciation actually is and how wrong one is to get used to it’.[11]

Following the feverish writing of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, Freud fell into what his biographer Peter Gay refers to as an ‘enforced solitude’ – a word that he suggests provokes, if it is not synonymous with, depression.[12] In September 1901, reanimated by his self-analysis (Didier Anzieu also subscribes Beckett’s breakthrough in writing to auto-analysis), he visited Rome, and sent enthused messages to his family wondering what had kept him so long from the pleasure that travel brought him.[13] The history of psychoanalysis was from the start, for Freud, a profoundly lonely enterprise: an enterprise that promises to create a state of temporary solitude that allows one to work through one’s loneliness in dialogue with another. In psychoanalysis the analysand listens to the sound of their voice repeated back to them; the analyst’s presence, like Fliess’s handwriting, facilitates an exploration of self: a way to think in dialogue (to displace, or at least loosen the hold of, the introjected voices that we internalize and take in as our own).

IV.

In his ‘Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis’ Freud writes that ‘in children the first phobias relating to situations are those of darkness and solitude. The former of these often persists throughout life; both are involved when a child feels the absence of some loved person who looks after it – its mother, that it is to say.’[14] Given the proximity of darkness and solitude, as Freud positions them, one finds it hard not to see them as synonymous (are we not in solitude, in a dark room, a room where the lights have gone out, and we grapple to hear a voice in the dark). If solitude is so often positioned in the history of thought as the precondition for reflection and intellectual thinking, Freud presents it instead as persecutory. He concedes that the peculiar conditions of solitude are somewhat analogous to ‘the crowd, the enclosed space, the thunder-storm’: it is not that one cannot always bear these states but that they are inseparable from our phobias, and are thus related to the first condition of fear: a separation from the mother.

What might it mean that certain people are drawn repeatedly, inexorably to states of solitude – that they convert solitude into their understanding of interiority (only by myself, do I have capacity to think; I think therefore I am alone)? There is always something potentially objectifying about loneliness: the risk of loneliness is that it might lead one to treat oneself as an object, to fetishise the self. Freud writes about ‘a compulsion to repeat’ in the same text in which he provides his most thorough analysis of child’s play as a way of managing loss.[15] The death drive is articulated in the framework of the child’s ability to work through the absence of the mother – an absence that seems more tenable than that of a parent’s loss of a child, as Freud and Riley suggest (Freud is thinking – through his grandson Ernst – of his own failure to manage the loss of his daughter Sophie – Ernst’s mother – in 1920). To take the true measure of death might, then, also be to take the true measure of solitude.

V.

Beckett renders solitude with all its phobias, and none of its literary romance. In Murphy, we find two interior social spaces that are inseparable from the psychic life of solitude: a mew in west Brompton – the itinerant world of pre-welfare 1930s London, and the asylum Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, the setting of the novel’s second half, where there is no separation for Murphy between life and work (where care work is, in all senses, deadly); where welfare is rendered inhumane because it does not recognise the importance of the relation between patient and carer. Reading Beckett, we become aware of how loneliness is produced by social institutions and how welfare – like literature – might ‘contain’ – in Bion’s sense – the darkness of solitude.[16] If the attempt to control the body is a way of managing the darkness of solitude in the first half of Murphy, in the second half of the novel, it is Murphy’s interaction with schizophrenic patients that provides him with a model to keep one’s own internal dialogue at bay. ‘His inner voice’, Beckett writes of the schizophrenic patient Mr Endon, ‘did not harangue him, it was unobtrusive and melodious, a gentle continuo in the whole consort of his hallucinations[…]a psychosis so limpid and imperturbable that Murphy felt drawn to it as Narcissus to his foundation’.[17] But, unlike Narcissus’s echo, Murphy achieves a true form of relationality with Mr Endon, a principle (that will become vital to the welfare state that would emerge ten years later – and to object relations psychoanalysis) which Beckett suggests involves safeguarding ‘what the psychiatrists called exile to think of the patients not as banished from a system of benefits but as escaped from a colossal fiasco’.[18]

The reality of the other imposes itself upon the hallucinatory voices that keep one company in states of solitude. It might be a way to hear the internal voices that we have within us so as not to come entirely under their authority. Bion would make use of a remarkably similar vocabulary in his 1953 paper ‘Language and the Schizophrenic’ in which he describes a patient who must escape ‘the prison’ of psychoanalysis – ‘a prison’, Bion notes, ‘that seemed sometimes to be me, sometimes psycho-analysis and sometimes his state of mind, which is a constant struggle with his internal objects’.[19] The state of loneliness is represented in Bion’s and Beckett’s work by a confusion of the senses: thus we read in Beckett’s Company (1980) ‘as for example when he hears, you first saw the light on such and such a day’.[20] In Bion’s paper, the key to overcoming the loneliness of schizophrenia lies in ‘the mastery of language’ which is presented as the key that releases one from the solitary prison of psychoanalysis.[21] The schizophrenic experiences their dissociation from the world as a failure of listen to the other: Bion cites a patient whose ‘hearing was felt to be defective because my words were being drowned by the tears that poured from his ears. When it emerged’, he writes, ‘that he couldn’t talk very well either I suggested that it was because he felt his tongue had been torn out and he had been left only with an ear’.[22]

VI.

In Klein’s posthumously published essay ‘On the Sense of Loneliness’ (1963), she observes that the schizophrenic’s experience of loneliness is a more exacerbated, extreme version of the loneliness experienced by everyone:

The schizophrenic feels that he is hopelessly in bits and that he will never be in possession of his self. The very fact that he is so fragmented results in his being unable to internalize his primal object (the mother) sufficiently as a good object and therefore in his lacking the foundation of stability; he cannot rely on an external and internal good object, nor can he rely on his own self. This factor is bound up with loneliness, for it increases the feeling of the schizophrenic that he is left alone, as it were, with his misery. The sense of being surrounded by a hostile world, which is characteristic of the paranoid aspect of schizophrenic illness, not only increases all his anxieties but vitally influences his feelings of loneliness.[23]

Writing an enthused letter to Klein in 1960, Bion presses her on her reflections on the distinction between different types of loneliness, and suggests that, as an emotional state, it might exceed language:

I think there may be a kind of “normal” loneliness which is an accompaniment of a capacity for integration and synthesis. Unfortunately there is no real word for it. I think of isolation, loneliness, but all carry something of a pathological meaning which is misleading.[24]

Doubtless the subject of loneliness was of interest to Bion as he was reflecting on his pioneering group work at the Tavistock clinic in the 1940s and 1950s, which radically transformed the nature of psychoanalysis, showing that it could be a collective as well as a solitary practice; that it could bring people together and reveal the nature of the dynamic between lonely subjects and isolated groups. In Experiences in Groups (1961), Bion revises Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1920) as he reflects on the subject of collective formation in the wake of the Second World War and the founding of the welfare state. ‘You cannot understand a recluse living in isolation,’ Bion writes, ‘unless you inform yourself about the group of which he is a member’.[25]

Group psychoanalysis might, then, afford the promise of revealing the social dynamics in which both isolation is produced (drowning the other out) and in which a desire for solitude takes hold (in which one might retreat into the darkness). A group therapy session might be a kind of echo chamber (when it fails to work), but it also provides an arena in which the individual might find a new way to participate in the emotional life of the group – and in so doing in their own emotional life – as they begin to take in, not merely hear, the voices around them – and thus become better attuned to their own internal voices. In Company, Beckett writes that ‘a certain activity of mind however slight is a necessary adjunct of company. That is why the voice does not say, you are on your back in the dark and have no mental activity of any kind. The voice alone is company but not enough’. Internalizing voices is essential, Beckett suggests, to the work of thought; it keeps one sane (in this sense, hearing voices, rather than being synonymous with going mad, might instead be a way to preserve sanity; of resisting the tyranny of an authoritative voice). Solitude might be the price we pay for a failed form of collectivity but it is not enough: one must transform the voice without a mouth into a language that speaks; and seek out the company that are not only found in one’s own head – but which engages the other’s embodied presence – that speaks ‘with him in the dark to and of whom the voice is speaking.’[26]

[1] Samuel Beckett, Company / Ill Seen / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still (London: Faber, 2009), 3.

[2] Sigmund Freud, The Penguin Freud Library, Vol 1: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1991), 444.

[3] Melanie Klein, ‘On the Sense of Loneliness’, in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works (London: Vintage, 1997), 301.

[4] Denise Riley, Say Something Back (London: Picador, 2016), 11.

[5] Adrienne Rich, ‘The Hermit’s Scream’ in What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 54-71.

[6] Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London: Faber, 2009), 3.

[7] Wilfred Bion, ‘Language and the Schizophrenic’ in New Directions in Psychoanalysis: The Significance of Infant Conflict in the Pattern of Adult Behaviour ed. Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann and R.E. Money-Kyrle (London: Karnac, 1985), 237.

[8] Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 18.

[9] Samuel Beckett, ‘Texts for Nothing’, in Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980 (London: John Calder, 1984), 152.

[10] Letter from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, December 8, 1895, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 (New York: Belknap Press, 1985), 57.

[11] Letter from Freud to Fliess, December 3 1987, 237.

[12] Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 135.

[13] Didier Anzieu, ‘Beckett and Bion’, International Review of Psycho-Analysis 16, 163-8 (168).

[14] Freud, ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’, SE 16, 407.

[15] Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, SE 18, 20.

[16] Wilfred Bion, Elements of Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2018), 3.

[17] Beckett, Murphy, 116.

[18] Ibid., 111-2.

[19] Bion, ‘Language and the Schizophrenic’, 228-9.

[20] Beckett, Company, 3.

[21] Bion, ‘Language and the Schizophrenic’, 233.

[22] Ibid., 231.

[23] Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 303-4.

[24] Letter from Wilfred Bion to Melanie Klein, February 14 1960 cited in Jane Milton, ‘From the Melanie Klein Archive: Klein’s Further Thoughts on Loneliness’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 99.4 (2018), 929-946 (933-935).

[25] Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups: and Other Papers (New York: Routledge, 1961), 133.

[26] Beckett, Company, 4.

Jess Cotton is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge.

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