Exploring the Three Constructs of Loneliness

The historical conceptualizing of loneliness has brought contemporarypsychology to three main constructs of loneliness, an affective component, a cognitivecomponent and a subjective component. These three components are represented by threepsychological approaches: psychodynamic, cognitive and existential.

The social needs approach is based on a psychodynamic tradition. One of the first to bring up loneliness as a serious pathological phenomenonwas the psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. According to Reichmann, loneliness is based on early childhood experience, arising due to a separationfrom the parents and/or a lack of satisfying physical contact and loving intimacy. Thiswill create a sense of isolation in the child which will follow the child into adulthood andcreate a fear of love and intimacy leaving the patient lonely. This understanding ofloneliness was shared by other psychodynamic writers, such as Harry Stack Sullivan whoalso emphasized the importance of tenderness from the parents in infancy and childhood(Sullivan,

What makes existentialism different from phenomenology is its focus on life’s main questions and how tragedies and negative events impact life. Existential psychology’s main focus is the human condition and how individuals come to terms with it (Jacobsen, 2007).The existentialistic approach towards loneliness is mainly different from the social needs approach and the cognitive approach in one specific way, it works with loneliness as a starting point. The two other approaches use specific scientific methodologies to understand the phenomenon loneliness, where existentialism as a science is grounded in the phenomenon, meaning it is methodology understood through the phenomenon being