Loneliness : Emotion or Feeling?

Loneliness means different social realities : it can refer both to a depopulated place, the situation of someone who is lonely or unmarried, but it can also be a necessary subjective state for the artist, or forced for the prisoner — and we could in this direction multiply and combine examples. Cécile Van de Velde summarizes and notes three paradigms for the notion : the residential solitude (living alone), relational solitude (being alone) and experiential solitude (feeling alone) (2018). Our proposal aims to shed more light on the origins and contours of the solitude object, in order to explore its nature and hermeneutic force. We therefore propose first to retrace the history of the study of loneliness, supporting its first philosophical (Svendsen, 2015 ; Mijuskovic, 2012) and psychological dimensions (think of the various scales of loneliness formalised since the last century (Russel et al., 1980)), before supporting the sociological perspective (Cohen, 2015 ; Elias, 1987 ; Durkheim, 1897). While the experience of loneliness may be recurrent and independent of relational isolation, there is nothing to indicate a priori whether the experience is positive or negative from an emotional point of view. In this sense, we stress the importance of noting the multiple forms of loneliness in real social life, its combinations with emotions such as happiness or sadness, its contexts of formation and the theoretical and practical implications of such a proposition. An increasingly considered research subject (Van de Velde, 2011 ; Doucet, 2007 ; Schurmans, 2003), we refer to loneliness here as a state and/or a feeling that gives rise to certain emotions in certain social situations. Thus, loneliness appears as an object that is much more complex than it might seem, enabling us in our study to better identify the resulting feelings and emotions in our contemporary societies.