Aeon | T Struth
Unlike solitude, loneliness is not merely the experience of aloneness. It is a feeling of a gap between oneself and others, the perception of an active, living, aching separation that the lonely person wishes were otherwise. In her classic paper ‘On the Sense of Loneliness’ (1963), the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein describes it as ‘the result of a ubiquitous yearning for an unattainable perfect internal state’, a state of wholeness or completion. Above: Crosby Street (1978) by Thomas Struth, Soho, New York.