Ozawa-de Silva Chikako. The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan

University of California Press, 2021. — 285 р. — ISBN 978-0520383487Loneliness is everybody’s business. We have all at times felt lonely, left behind, left out, or abandoned. This is perfectly normal, because—as this book shows—the roots of our ability to feel lonely lie in the very nature of our brain and biology, our need for social connection, and the nature of what it means to be a person, a self. As human beings, we experience a continuous tug of war between our need to belong and connect socially and the fact that our consciousness, self, and subjectivity are def i ned by a sense of separation from what is “not me.”
Some people, however, experience not just moments of loneliness, but loneliness as an enduring state. They feel excessively lonely. This af f l iction is not necessarily a mental disorder or mental illness; it is not reducible to a sickness of the body or the mind. However we may categorize it, it is an af f l iction of subjectivity, meaning that it is true in the experience of a person but not necessarily visible to people on the outside. A person may be surrounded by family and friends yet be feeling terribly lonely. The fact that this is becoming increasingly common in modern societies should be a cause for concern.