by Lisa Koshkarian, Ph.D.

REDRESS

I was rolling along with my perpetually muffled silent scream for omnipresent sociocultural atrocities, attempting to balance this dueful recognition and feeling state with an orientation toward hope and love, when I received an unexpected email from a fellow psychoanalytic writer. So pleasantly surprised was I by his initiative to reach out for a conversation with a stranger, even further moved by the vulnerability contained in his note and attached papers, I immediately soaked in all of his words. It was one of those uncanny life experiences when I thought I was existing just fine, meeting all of the needs I was aware of as best as I could, when someone appears out of the blue who senses, defines, and meets an inner hunger all at once. Oh, the ache of that.

Among other poignant shares, he introduced a term called “ethical loneliness”, originally coined and written about by Jill Stauffer (2015). Ethical loneliness refers to the assault of being utterly abandoned by humanity followed by the cruelty of wrongs going unacknowledged, thereby barricading all pathways of redress. In two simple words, his offering enveloped and told the story of grief underlying that muffled scream. For me, it captured and explained the most pressing pandemic of all which preoccupies much of my mental life, the carelessly enacted barbarity of discounting vulnerable beings. Suddenly, this colleague afforded a spaciously precise construct to accompany me in images of a Gazan father holding his dead baby in his arms, an Israeli hostage describing sexual assault in captivity, a non-binary child taking their life after being bullied at school, a woman forcibly impregnated by a family member no longer legally able to access abortion, a client hiding in her closet for hours at a time as a child because those walls were the only “persons” who could absorb her emotional pain. And on and on. I longed for this phrase without ever previously knowing of its existence because it gave me a companion to my silent scream who could help me narrate my perpetual horror and sadness about inhumanity. The injustice of not being seen or heard, and the ensuing existential loneliness.

And I needed it to come from a psychoanalyst, but I only understood why after the fact. I rejoined with this gentle collaborator that I, too, experienced ethical loneliness as a child, despite being raised within a psychoanalytic community, the very place where one might assume my subjectivity and humanity would have been adequately attended to. My choice as an adult to return to psychoanalysis has afforded me ongoing opportunities to witness, accompany, and return voice to clients abandoned by humanity. This has positioned me as available to fellow life travelers who care to think and feel together about the suffering, joys, and everything in between, of what it means to be human. I appreciate my choice most acutely in these beautifully serendipitous moments when my passion is spontaneously quenched.