On Being Alone

Being alone, when it works, is a gorgeous paradox. What to me seemed singular, or individual, or individuating about aloneness has been wonderfully disturbed by the writing of Donald Woods Winnicott. In a paper originally given at the Extra Scientific Meeting for British Psychoanalysts in 1957, Winnicott explores what might be obvious to some: that we can only truly be alone in the presence of an other.