Solitude is related to the first anxiety experiences. As Bowlby (1973) remarked, the aforementioned observation of Freud “lies at the heart of his theory of anxiety” . The prototype of anxiety is the fear of separation from loved ones, initially from the mother, especially in infancy, the period of absolute helplessness.
In the Freudian view, anxiety emerges in aloneness and darkness, only because these two situations mean separation, and if it persists throughout life, it becomes neurotic. Regardless of the model of anxiety he adopts (i.e., anxiety as a transformation of undischarged libido or anxiety as a signal of a danger), Freud always associated anxiety with traumatic object loss.
He wrote (Freud, 1905/1953) that “anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact that they are feeling the loss of the person they love” (p. 224), and in a later essay (Freud, 1926/1959a), “anxiety appears as the reaction to the felt loss of the object” (p. 137). In the course of development, anxiety is determined also by the threat of losing the love of the object. Freud (1926/1959a) distinguished between anxiety as a reaction to the danger of loss and the pain of mourning which is the reaction to the actual loss of the object. Thus, loneliness may be regarded as the painful longing for the lost object or for the loss of the love of the object.
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