"Struggling to articulate the experience of her psychotic patients — "the history of the lonely ones" — Frieda was painfully aware of the obstacles that faced her: "People who are in the grip of severe degrees of loneliness cannot talk about it; and people who have at some time in the past had such an experience can seldom do so either, for it is so frightening and uncanny in character that they try to dissociate the memory of what it was like, and even the fear of it." Psychiatrists, she admitted, "must resign themselves to describing [loneliness] in terms of peoples defenses against it," like physicists portraying invisible particles in terms of the residual trace of their movements. Actually, Frieda noted, it was worse than this: defenses didn't appear until the "all-engulfing intensity" of the feeling decreased; the "naked horror" of real loneliness, "beyond anxiety and tension," made even defenses "seem out of reach."
Faced with the irony of trying to write about something that, by her own admission, couldn't be described, Frieda did the best she could, relying on accounts by polar explorers, shipwrecked sailors, inmates in solitary confinement, and subjects in sensory deprivation experiments. In each of these situations, she noted, psychotic disintegration occurred if relationships weren't reinstated.
(Frieda argued that many of the phenomena categorized as "anxiety" (e.g., separation anxiety) were better described as loneliness or the fear of it. She saw psychiatrists as being so overwhelmingly focused on anxiety as to neglect the systematic study of the important emotional states, including grief, hope, pain, and envy, as well as the loneliness to which her own attention was drawn)."
Gail A. Hornstein, To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World
