"To Heinz Kohut's classic question, "How does analysis cure?" Frieda had a clear answer: the relationship with the therapist heals the loneliness that lies at the root of all mental illness. A person can't act like others if he feels completely isolated. [...] The loneliness of mental illness, Frieda emphasized, is nothing like the solitude people seek at the ocean or to do creative work. It is a state of extraordinary anguish in which a person ceases to be able to imagine, much less experience, anyone else being able to enter his experience.
[...] Frieda called loneliness "one of the least satisfactorily conceptualized psychological phenomena" and noted that it wasn't even mentioned in most psychiatric textbooks (a fact she found astonishing). Among the few analysts to write anything on the topic was Melanie Klein, and like Frieda, she had done this work late in life. Klein emphasized the unsatisfied longing for "an understanding without words," rooted in the earliest relationship with the mother. Frieda stressed the "incommunicable, isolated core — the corollary to our need for interpersonal intimacy."
Gail A. Hornstein, To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World [pags 305/306]
