Mantis Weekend 2024 | Saturday 12 October – Lecture 1: Love & Loneliness in Matthew Arnold’s Poetry

Abstract

In this seminar we explore our human tendency to suffer loneliness and isolation despite a deep innate need for connection. We will reflect on the inner force that protects us against the vulnerability of relatedness, a force that pushes us to the safety of narcissism, the unrelated attitude.

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” (Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections).

Matthew Arnold described the same loneliness: being unable to convey one’s deepest thoughts and feelings to another and especially to a loved one. In his poem “The Buried Life” he writes with disillusionment and pain about the cruel limitations of love and connection, he laments: “Alas! Is even love too weak / to unlock the heart and let it speak?”

Arnold’s belief was that only love can help us bear the unbearable reality and the loneliness of a broken world. In his poem “Dover Beach” he pleads with his loved one: “Ah, love, let us be true to one another / For the world before us …/ Hath really neither joy nor love nor light …”

Jung encouraged individuation, the individual’s inner journey towards wholeness. Individuation brings to birth a “consciousness of all human community precisely because it makes us aware of the unconscious, which unites and is common to all mankind. Individuation is an at-one-ment with oneself and at the same time with humanity, since oneself is part of humanity.” (CW 16 par 227).

Loneliness can then be transformed into meaningful solitude.

About the Presenter

Marita de Wet is a Counselling Psychologist and Jungian Analyst practicing in Paarl, South Africa. She is chair of SAAJA’s Public Programme Committee and serves on the Curriculum and Library Committees. She is interested in the intelligence of emotions and limitations of reason; the brain and how we create the world we live in; rudimentary epistemology, especially the development over time of the nature, sources, limits and justification of knowledge regarding the feminine.