The term ‘solitary’ reverberates through the depth-psychology corpus with remarkable ambivalence, functioning simultaneously as a condition of spiritual discipline, psychological necessity, existential peril, and archetypal vocation. Jung’s Red Book presents the solitary as a quasi-mythological figure who inhabits the desert with sun-oriented longing, estranged from the manifold yet mysteriously entrusted with a healing work the community requires. The Philokalia’s Evagrios the Solitary offers the ascetic counterpart: withdrawal from worldly association as the precondition for hesychast stillness and undistracted prayer. Hillman complicates this polarity decisively by grounding the solitary condition in the archetypal loneliness inseparable from each daimon’s uniqueness — a loneliness that is not remediable but constitutive of being alive. Epictetus unsettles the literal equation altogether, insisting that solitude is a matter of fidelity and inner community, not mere physical isolation. Nussbaum’s Aristotelian analysis presses the opposite case: the genuinely solitary life, however furnished with goods, remains fatally incomplete without philia. Winnicott’s developmental reading mediates these poles: the capacity to be alone in the presence of another marks psychological maturity. What unifies these disparate voices is a shared recognition that the solitary state is never psychologically simple — it is always already in tension with desire, vocation, community, and the interior life.
The solitary lives in endless desert full of awesome beauty. He looks at the whole and at inner meaning. He loathes manifold diversity if it is near him.
Jung constructs the solitary as an archetypal figure whose perceptual economy demands simplicity at close range and totality at distance, sustained not by human warmth but by the transpersonal energy of the sun.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
Solitary, who are you waiting for? Whose help do you require? There is none who can rush to your aid, since all look to you and wait for your healing art.
Jung dramatizes the paradox of the solitary’s vocation: the world’s expectation falls precisely upon the one who has withdrawn from it, whose isolated labor is the precondition for communal healing.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
if there is an archetypal sense of loneliness accompanying us from the beginning, then to be alive is also to feel lonely… When feelings of loneliness are seen as archetypal, they become necessary.
Hillman reframes solitary loneliness not as pathology or punishment but as an archetypal inevitability rooted in the daimon’s uniqueness, thereby liberating it from identification with literal isolation.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
Do you desire, then, to embrace this life of solitude, and to seek out the blessings of stillness? If so, abandon the cares of the world… free yourself from attachment to material things.
Evagrios the Solitary presents the solitary life as a deliberate ascetic program of renunciation whose telos is hesychast stillness and liberation from passion.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
it is not the sight of a human creature which removes us from solitude, but the sight of one who is faithful and modest and helpful to us.
Epictetus dissolves the literal-physical definition of solitude, arguing that true solitude is the absence of trustworthy fellowship and that mere numbers of persons provide no remedy.
, Discourses, 108thesis
When we are not alone when we are on our own, then we have achieved solitude. The person who attains solitude is alone in his or her unique experience of the journey, yet such a person is conscious of an inner presence with which to dialogue.
Hollis distinguishes solitude from mere aloneness, positioning achieved solitude as the psychological condition in which the individuation process becomes possible through inner dialogue.
, Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, 1996thesis
Its source, however, seems to be the solitary uniqueness of each daimon, an archetypal loneliness inexpressible in a child’s vocabulary and formulated hardly better in ours.
Hillman locates the origin of existential loneliness in the irreducible singularity of the daimon, making solitary experience the shadow-side of individual vocation.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
Being able to enjoy being alone along with another person who is also alone is in itself an experience of health… solitude that is relatively free from the property that we call ‘withdrawal’.
Winnicott reframes solitude developmentally as a mature relational capacity — the ability to be alone in the presence of another — distinguishing healthy solitude from pathological withdrawal.
, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis
nobody would choose to have all the good things in the world all by himself. For the human being is a political creature and naturally disposed to living-with.
Nussbaum, reading Aristotle, argues that the solitary life — however richly endowed — is constitutively incomplete, since philia is a part of eudaimonia and not merely instrumental to it.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
The opponent says that a solitary or apolitical life is entirely sufficient for human eudaimonia if one has no need for the good things that the political supplies.
Nussbaum stages the Aristotelian debate over the sufficiency of the solitary life, setting up the argument that political and relational belonging constitute, rather than merely serve, human flourishing.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
The loner commingles with a solitary, transcendent God, monomania and monotheism indistinguishable, performing a parody of this last and famous passage in Plotinus’ Enneads: ‘the passing of solitary to solitary.’
Hillman traces the dark inflation of the solitary ideal through Plotinus’ mystical formula, warning that the merger of individual solitude with transcendent singularity can degenerate into megalomania.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Perhaps the Old Wise Man has come back to teach us the forgotten art of solitude.
Nichols reads the Tarot Hermit as an archetypal carrier of solitude-as-wisdom, positioning the solitary figure as a cultural teacher whose art has been forgotten in modern life.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
We solitaries lack these things, because we live in the wilderness and sickness is rare among us.
The Philokalia identifies a specific spiritual hazard of the solitary life — the atrophying of compassion through isolation — requiring deliberate cultivation of care for the sick and imprisoned.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
Undistracted prayer is the highest intellection of the intellect. Prayer is the ascent of the intellect to God.
Evagrios the Solitary frames hesychast solitude as the necessary container for undistracted prayer, which represents the intellect’s highest operation and its ascent to the divine.
, The Philokalia, Volume 1, 1979supporting
Having read in Jung that the saints in the desert found that such isolation strengthened their unconscious, I thought that I must try that out!
Von Franz reports a personal experiment with deliberate solitary isolation, drawing on Jung’s observation that desert isolation intensifies unconscious activity, and recounts how enforced stillness eventually released psychic material.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
Solitary, TI: alone, single; isolated, abandoned. 4.4b Solitariness distancing substance indeed. 9.5b Not solitary affluence indeed.
The I Ching concordance registers ‘solitary’ (TI) as a recurring hexagram-level quality, associating it with states of abandonment, withdrawal, and a complex interplay between isolation and inner abundance.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting
Do not pass your time with people engaged in worldly affairs or share their table, in case they involve you in their illusions and draw you away from the science of stillness.
The Philokalia prescribes deliberate social restriction as a protective discipline for the solitary, framing worldly association as a threat to the ‘science of stillness.’
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
Today’s secular Everyman who cannot or does not embrace religious faith must indeed take the journey alone.
Yalom reads the medieval Everyman as an allegory of existential isolation, arguing that the modern secular subject, stripped of religious consolation, faces ultimate solitude without metaphysical companionship.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and ‘Supermax’ Confinement… The Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement: A Systematic Critique.
Keltner cites research on institutional solitary confinement as a context for understanding how forced isolation degrades psychological health, contrasting it with chosen solitude.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023aside
The negative aspect of being an only child is that it means being lonely. The same considerations apply to
Edinger connects the archetype of the only-begotten ego — solitary by structural necessity — to the experience of loneliness as an inescapable aspect of individuation.
, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, 1972aside