woman in solitude walking through a lonely vista_-_Eleni_Paltoglou-Blümel painting
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woman in solitude walking through a lonely vista_-_Eleni_Paltoglou-Blümel painting

Exploring Loneliness in Clients and Therapists

Perspectives for clinical work

With Michael Buchholz, Lesley Caldwell, Aleksandar Dimitrijević, Gamze Özçürümez Bilgili & Zack Eleftheriadou (Chair)

This recorded webinar focuses on aloneness, loneliness, and solitude and their general clinical relevance as well as the therapist's experience. 

In our feedback participants were very interested in the psychotherapist’s loneliness. As Psychotherapists, the work involves being dedicated to helping others, often neglecting one's own well-being. Research reveals therapist's vulnerability to self-harming behaviours, addictions, and even suicide attempts. Aleksandar Dimitrijević’s presentation explores the loneliness inherent in therapists’ lives and its impact on their psychological health. The core themes identified in his presentation are:

    • Personality traits that influence the choice of the profession.
    • Countertransference reactions to patients’ chronic loneliness.
    • The sacrifice of “true” social connections for the passion of therapeutic work.

Other themes running through these fascinating talks include the idea that loneliness is a pervasive societal issue, central to many mental health struggles, underscoring its significance in clinical practice.

Lesley Caldwell offers a theoretical perspective whilst Michael Buchholz examines enmeshment in family dynamics, aiding a child’s recovery from addiction and finally Gamze Özçürümez Bilgili offers a paper working with extreme trauma survivors facing profound isolation.

This recorded event combines theory and practice, fostering dialogue on addressing loneliness in clinical work while spotlighting the often-overlooked loneliness of psychotherapists themselves.

 

Programme

Introductions 
Aleksandar Dimitrijević 
Introduction to the topic of loneliness and its clinical relevance 

In this introduction to the event Aleksandar Dimitrijević will define the basic concepts of aloneness, loneliness, and solitude and their general clinical relevance to set the scene. 

Lesley Caldwell 
Psychoanalytic Accounts of Loneliness and Solitude 

This paper discusses the contributions to the area of loneliness and solitude of two significant thinkers of postwar psychoanalysis, Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein. Their accounts of the neonate and of human nature represent divergent assessments of human subjectivity and its origins, deriving from very different suppositions about early life and the weight to be assigned to innate and environmental factors. The infants they discuss are very different beings with lives shaped by very different ways of sustaining internal conflicts and the importance of the external world in that negotiation. This paper discusses  their different theoretical and clinical assumptions and emphasises their relevance beyond the analytic session for more general ideas of life and living.

Q&A 
Michael Buchholz
The Loneliness of Enmeshed Families 

In many families, a hidden dimension of loneliness is experienced by its members due to a sense of being "enmeshed" rather than "related" to each other. The key distinction lies in the experience of relational dynamics. When you are "related to" someone, you can choose when to engage in and disengage from your relationships, giving you a sense of "relational time" and the ability to enjoy moments of solitude rather than loneliness. However, in cases of being "enmeshed," there is often little time for personal space, and you may feel trapped in a state of constant togetherness. Members of enmeshed families tend to experience high levels of loneliness with limited opportunities for solitude. The objective is to illustrate this phenomenon by presenting transcripts from the initial 20 minutes of a family session involving a 17-year-old drug addict.

Q &A 
Break 
Gamze Özçürümez Bilgili 
Loneliness of the Traumatised 

We, as human beings, are born prematurely. Before completing our development, we are 'thrown into the world', making us dependent on the help and care of our environment for an extended period. Consequently, the significance of having others to protect us from various dangers, and an environment to provide support is extraordinary. Due to this inherent helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) at the core of our existence, it becomes imperative to establish lifelong bonds with others. Conversely, each time a major catastrophe occurs, the fundamental helplessness and the tremendous anxiety it generates resurface. The loss of loved ones, as well as the loss of familiar places and the home to which we are deeply attached, lead to real and psychical homelessness. The objective of this presentation is to contemplate the loneliness experienced by those who have been traumatized, viewed through the perspective of an earthquake survivor. 

Q&A 
Aleksandar Dimitrijević 
The Psychotherapist’s Loneliness 

Focused on helping others more than on helping themselves, psychotherapists often neglect their own well-being. Several empirical studies confirm that psychotherapists are often prone to self-harming behaviour, addictions, and suicide attempts. In this presentation, I will explore the possible role of loneliness in the lives and psycho(patho)logy of therapists. Beginning with the personality type/s that often stand behind the professional choice, we will discuss the role of countertransference reactions to patients’ chronic loneliness and the passion for psychotherapeutic work at the expense of “true” social life. In conclusion, some ideas about how psychotherapists could prevent and or overcome their loneliness will be shared, which will also serve as an invitation to the audience members to share their strategies and experiences. 

Q&A 
Panel Discussion with Q&A 
End 

 

Michael Buchholz

Michael Buchholz, fully trained psychoanalyst and social scientist, was professor for social psychology at IPU (International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin) and is now senior professor and head of the first institute at IPU, named “JUNKTIM”. His research was oriented to clinical and supervision topics, used the analysis of metaphors developed in the field of cognitive linguistics and, more recently, turned to conversation analysis as a useful tool to describe and understand what’s going on in the treatment room. Recent publications can be taken from the list of references.

Lesley Caldwell

Lesley Caldwell is Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College, London (UCL). She is a psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytic Association (BPA), a Clinical Associate of the British Psychoanalytic Society (BPAS), now retired from private practice in London. She continues to supervise, lecture and consult internationally. She is a European member of the IPA board and Europe’s representative on the IPA’s Executive Committee. She is on the editorial board of COWAP (the IPA group on women and psychoanalysis) book series. 

She was an Editor and Trustee for the Winnicott Trust from 2002 to 2016 and its Chair of Trustees from 2008 to 2012. With Helen Taylor Robinson she is Joint General Editor of the Collected Works of Donald Winnicott (OUP, 2016), which won The American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis book prize (History section) in 2017. 

Professor Caldwell is also Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Italian department at UCL. She has written extensively on the Italian family, the topic of her book, Italian Family Matters (Macmillan, 1991), on Italian cinema, and on the city of Rome. She contributed to the New Library Collection Reading Italian Psychoanalysis (2017). 

She is currently working on a book of her papers on Winnicott, transitionality and illusion, and a book on Rome for Cambridge University press. 

Aleksandar Dimitrijević

Aleksandar Dimitrijević, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. He works as a lecturer at the International Psychoanalytic University and in private practice in Berlin. He has given lectures, seminars, university courses, and conference presentations throughout Europe and the US. He is the author of many conceptual and empirical papers about attachment theory and research, psychoanalytic education, psychoanalysis and the arts, some of which were translated into German, Hungarian, Italian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Turkish. He has also edited or co-edited fourteen books or special journal issues. His next project is the multi-volume Hearing Silencing (co-edited with Michael B. Buchholz; Karnac Books). 

Gamze Özçürümez Bilgili

Gamze Özçürümez Bilgili, M.D., is a psychiatrist and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She is a full-time professor at Başkent University Faculty of Medicine, head of Department of Psychiatry, and invited lecturer at International Psychoanalytic University-Berlin. She is in training at Istanbul Psychoanalytical Association. She is founding coordinator of Neuropsychoanalysis Working Unit of Psychiatric Association of Turkey, and member of Turkish Neuropsychoanalysis Study Group. Her main fields of research and publication are psychoanalytic psychotherapy, psychoanalytic theory and literature, psychosomatics, trauma, personality disorders, and consultation liaison psychiatry. 

Zack Eleftheriadou

Dr Zack Eleftheriadou is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist and Fellow of the British Psychological Society (HCPC reg). She has trained as a child and parent-infant psychotherapist (CPJA/UKCP) and as an adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist (CPJA/UKCP & Tavistock Society/BPC). Zack runs the consultancy service ‘Noema Psychology and Psychotherapy’, providing psychotherapy, supervision and teaching. She lectures in the following areas: developmental issues, trauma/complex trauma, migration/cross-cultural work and the ‘replacement child’ psychodynamics. She has published widely, including the text ‘Psychotherapy and Culture’. She is member of The Bowlby Centre and is a visiting external examiner for Doctoral projects across the UK. She feels passionate about early intervention and regularly presents on ‘the psychology of the baby’, for health professionals and psychotherapists. She has previously worked in several London NHS Hospitals and charities, such as Nafsiyat Intercultural Therapy Centre and Freedom from Torture. She is also currently an honourary psychotherapist of the Tavistock Complex Trauma Service.

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