Existential isolation
Loneliness is usually treated as a shortage. Not enough people, not close enough, and the remedy follows from the diagnosis. In Existential Psychotherapy (1980), Irvin Yalom spends Part III arguing that the word covers three different situations, and that only two of them are shortages.
Three kinds
The first is interpersonal: distance from other people. Its causes can be named. Where a person lives, what happened to them, what they do when someone comes close. Change any of those and the distance changes.
The second is intrapersonal: distance from parts of oneself. Wishes a person does not admit to having, feelings kept at arm's length. Yalom treats this as the classic territory of psychotherapy, the split that therapy exists to close.
The third is neither. Yalom names it existential isolation and describes it as a gulf between oneself and any other being that cannot be bridged — Existential Psychotherapy, Part III.
The word doing the work is unbridgeable. Better relationships do not reduce this one. Nobody else lives in your body, nobody else will be present at your death, and nobody receives the world exactly as it arrives to you. A person can be well married, well surrounded, and no less alone in that sense than anyone else.
Why the distinction matters
Yalom's clinical point is that people mistake the third kind for the first and try to solve it with company. The relationship is then asked to do something no relationship can do: end the separateness. What follows is familiar. The demand for constant contact, the resentment when the other person turns out to have a separate life, the fusion that dissolves both parties rather than joining them.
The opposite mistake is quieter. Someone who decides the gulf is total stops attempting the ordinary closeness that was available.
What is left to do
Yalom's answer is not consolation. He does not argue that the isolation is smaller than it looks. He argues that it can be faced with someone present rather than alone, and that two people who have each accepted the fact can meet across it without pretending it is gone. On that reading the relationship is worth something not because it fills the gap, but because the other person has stopped demanding the gap be filled.
What have I been asking other people to do for me that no one can do?
Epimelea is a therapy app built around the existential school. Sessions carry over from one to the next, and the archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.