Object relations and the capacity to be alone

The study was designed primarily to test a hypothesis based on the object relations literature, particularly Winnicott's discussion of the capacity to be alone. That is, high tolerance of physical aloneness in adults should be associated with relatively healthy and mature internal representations of the self and others, while low tolerance of physical aloneness should be associated with developmentally less mature internal representations.

Subjects—56 adult outpatients—were interviewed about their tolerance of aloneness: the nature of discomfort experienced in aloneness, behavioral responses to the discomfort, amount of time spent in physical isolation, and relation of moods to experience• of aloneness. This information was (1) summarized as a source of phenomenological data, and (2) used as a screening method to select the two experimental groups: the group with high tolerance for aloneness and the group with low tolerance for aloneness. Selection was based on agreement between raters of the interview transcripts and the subjects' therapists' ratings. Three sources of projective data were then co lected from each experimental subject: early memories, stories in response to the Object Relations Technique, and dreams. Dreams and early memories were scored by Krohn's Object-Representation Scale for Dreams; Object Relations Technique stories did not prove amenable to scoring by this system, and were instead scored by a system developed by the author.

Results provided partial support for the primary hypothesis. More high tolerance subjects obtained scores on their early memories which were above the overall mean than did low tolerance subjects. High tolerance subjects were more likely to score high scores and low tolerance subjects were more likely to score low scores on both dreams and early memories. Scores on ORT stories, however, showed no significant differences between groups.

In addition, phenomenological data suggested that situational factors (divorce, assault, relocation, for example) seem to account for reductions in tolerance of aloneness, in addition to the more long standing degree of internal object representation development.