La experiencia de soledad del analista

Abstract

In her classic, posthumously published article on loneliness, Fromm-Reichmann (1959) cites A. Courtauld's observations of isolation in a Greenland weather station. Courtauld (1932) recommends that “only persons with active, imaginative minds, who do not suffer from a nervous disposition and are not given to brooding, and who can occupy themselves by such means as reading, should go on polar expeditions.” It is the thesis of this article that the habits of mind required to bear the loneliness of analytic exploration are remarkably similar. It is in the realm of the imagination, relatively protected from brooding and anxiety, nurtured and stimulated by selected reading, that the context for withstanding the loneliness of analytic inquiry can be created.