Annotations
We have language for experiences like mine. We name anxiety, depression, or postpartum adjustment disorder. But none of these quite touch on what felt most disorienting for me, which was not fear or numbness, but the fact that I’d lost the ability to rest in solitude.
It took time to understand that this was not a personal failure, but a shift in the labour solitude was being asked to absorb.
The British analyst Donald Winnicott argued that the ability to be alone is not a personality trait but something that develops out of experience.
His best-known line about solitude is deliberately paradoxical: ‘The basis of the capacity to be alone is the experience of being alone in the presence of someone.’
He meant that we learn how to rest, play and think on our own only after we have known what it feels like to be reliably accompanied, to have someone nearby who is not intrusive but also not absent.
Feminist scholars like Nancy Chodorow have long argued that caregiving itself depends on how care is socially organised and shared.
In his later writing, Winnicott focused on what he called the facilitating environment: the ordinary supports that allow a person to keep functioning and feel real over time.
In Bion’s account, thinking is not a given but an achievement that depends on having had enough support for feelings to be transformed into thoughts.
When pressure cannot be processed, when there is too much coming in and nowhere to put it, experience does not become reflection at all. Instead, it is discharged into action and vigilance.
Klein, a psychoanalyst whose ideas shaped much of 20th-century thinking about emotional life (including the work of Bion and Winnicott), understood mourning not as letting go, but as learning to hold good and bad aspects of the same relationship together without splitting them apart.