Abstract
We shall not demonstrate here what has already been demonstrated with files of special investigations and pages of fiction, the fact that old people do suffer from loneliness. It is perhaps even possible to use the term diagnostically. However, to treat loneliness therapeutically means to fail in a great number of cases, no matter how much warmth and love we are giving our patients. In the rare cases of success we have to admit that we have been dealing not with the loneliness itself, but with a clinical entity of a somewhat different type that we are a bit more accustomed to coping with. When Erich Lindemann,1 for instance, discusses the treatment of acute grief syndrome, he doesn’t deal with loneliness, although his patients have just lost their intimates.
(The question) we debate upon is not a trifle, but it is (a question) about being or not being mad. Epict. Disset. 1.22, 28
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Notes
Erich Lindemann, “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief”, Amer. Journ. of Psychiatry 101, no. 2 (1944).
See the manual by Prof. Jerald Cory on the theory and practice of therapy.
Claudio Naranjo, Gestalt Therapy. The Attitude and Practice of an Athsoritical Experientialism (Nevade City, CA, 1993).
We are left alone, without an excuse. Existentialism is a Humanism.
See Ben Mijuskovic, Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology and Literature (Assen: 1979).
See Alex Fryszman, “Kierkegaardian Theory of Communication and Dialogical Thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin,” in Mikhail Bakhtin and the Prospectives of the Human Sciences (Vitebsk: 1994), p. 31 (in Russian). Cf. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. N. Thulstrup (Gyldendal: Det danske Sprog, 1968), VIII 2 B 70, and Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Verker, ed. P. P. Rohde (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962, 1964), Vol. 6, p. 207.
See our paper “Schizophrenia as the Problem of a Theory of Intersubjectivity” for the 2nd World Phenomenological Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, Sept. 11–18, 1995, the Proceedings of which will be published in the Analecta Husserliana series.
There is a problem with the Russian “smysl”. Its original meaning differs seriously from any European equivalents traditionally used. Refer to Dr. Vadim Liapunov in his brilliant commentary in his English version of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Toward a Philosophy of the Act (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).
Steven G. Neely, “The Absurd, the Self, the Future, My Death: A Reexamination of Sartre’s Views on Suicide,” Phenomenological Inquiry, Vol. 19 (Oct., 1995), p. 160.
See his monograph on life, death and suicide (1975).
Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, op. cit.
Søren Kierkegaard, Entweder-Oder (Köln: J. Hegner, 1960).
See our “Meta-Theory of Consciousness and Psychiatric Practice,” in Analecta Husserliana XLV III, pp. 319–328 (Dordrecht: Academic Publishers, 1996).
Refer to our Guadalajara paper, op. cit., to consider mechanisms.
Dr. Liapunov uses the term “individually responsible act” here. We are aware of his well-grounded position, but we stress the process, not a single act or a number of discrete acts.
This is where word and world are the same. As for Aristotle or, more recently, Alfred Tarski, see the latter’s “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages,” in Logic, Semantics and Metamathematics (Oxford, 1956), p. 1
Quintiliani Institutionis Orationae Libri, 12 thed. Rademacher (Lipsiae: Teuber, 1959), 2.14.1-6.
See J.-P. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (New York, 1956).
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Borodulin, V., Vasiliev, A. (2000). The Phenomenon of Loneliness and The Meta-Theory of Consciousness. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Origins of Life. Analecta Husserliana, vol 67. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4058-4_8
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