Loneliness: a new psychopathological dimension?

Alberto Siracusano

President of Italian Society of Psychopathology, Chair of Psychiatry, Department of Systems Medicine, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy

The concept of loneliness has raised the interest of cultural and scientific community. For instance the existentialist thought considered loneliness as one of the main features of human existence: every single human being “alone”, abandoned in the world and forced to experience the consciousness of finitude and the awareness of nothingness. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus, in their literary production, faced this fundamental theme identifying the core of the concept in the controversial relationship with other subjects undermined by the presumed impossibility of an authentic communication.

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