Loneliness

The Emergence of a Social Science of Loneliness

In 1959, Fromm-Reichmann observed that the term loneliness did not appear in most psychiatric textbooks. The following decade yielded only a few dozen new publications on loneliness, leading Robert Weiss (1973, p. 1) to lament that, while “severe loneliness appears to be almost as prevalent as colds during the winter,” it continued to be neglected in psychiatry, psychology, and sociology. His Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation (1973) was a major impetus to the “flowering” of loneliness research in the 1970s and 1980s. This neglected emotion, it turned out, represented social malaise of a grand scale. If, as some polls indicated, over one-fourth of adults had in the past few weeks felt “very lonely or remote from other people,” then there were fifty million very lonely citizens. Even applying a narrower definition, loneliness surfaced as a “serious personal problem” for at least ten percent of the population.

Not only were there more lonely people than anyone had imagined, there were signs that modern society made people lonely. In a series of critiques of American society, a number of trends and national characteristics were linked to loneliness, including rapid social change, the contradictions of mass society, secularization and bureaucratization, the apparent decline of community and kinship, high rates of divorce and single parenthood, solitary living, excesses of consumerism, the uncritical acceptance of new technologies, competitiveness, continuing inequality, and a growing emphasis on individualism at the expense of commitment. According to one summation, “People are lonely today because of both the psychological baggage they carry with them and the peculiar way American society alienates the potentially closest of friends, colleagues, lovers, and workmates” (Gordon 1976, p. 22).

Existing research, though sparse, implicated loneliness as a cause or correlate in a wide range of health problems and deviance, from suicide and sex offenses to hypertension and heart disease to anxieties and addictions. In sheer scale, the problem was unprecedented. “More people probably live alone in New York and other large cities than ever before in history,” wrote the director of psychiatric services at a New York City hospital. “More people deal with day-to-day aloneness if not loneliness…. Living alone is a relatively new phenomenon in human history. One wonders whether a thousand years ago anyone lived alone” (Satran 1978, p. 294). Loneliness was a problem whose time had come, and the literature increased exponentially. By the turn of the century, the relevant bibliography numbered in the thousands, and there were scores of new loneliness-relevant publications annually, including “traditional” work on the measurement, causes, and consequences of loneliness, reports on the design and evaluation of intervention programs, cross-cultural studies of national and ethnic effects, and debates about the implications for future loneliness of technological innovations such as the Internet.

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