Void and Solitude

A few months ago, during a psychotherapy session with Luis (a pseudonym), he gathered the courage to speak more directly and honestly than usual:

“I don’t know how to explain it, Doctor. It’s ridiculous, pathetic, almost tragic… I have everything. A wife who loves me, a job where I feel successful, three beautiful children. I have friends, the energy to run and play padel... And yet, there is this thing I feel, which won't let me sleep, which forbids me from smiling. It is an inexplicable void… I hate it, and it makes me hate myself.”

Luis describes a sensation that resonates with alarming frequency in the clinic: the shattering void. It is an experience that cuts across all social classes. This mystery is invariably accompanied by a constant shadow: solitude.

I think of Camila (a pseudonym). Her story is the quintessential example of the "modern, fulfilled woman." She details her morning with clockwork precision—the routine of children, work, and goodbye kisses. Minutes later, while heading to her office, she is assaulted by an overwhelming sense of loneliness and a stinging guilt for not appreciating all the good she has.

“I feel like my life is a theater, that I’m faking it all the time, Doctor. I have everything I need to be happy, but inside I’m a mess. I feel ungrateful, and that guilt eats away at the little self-worth I have left.”

It is here where the void, solitude, and low self-esteem (the sense of worthlessness Camila describes) join hands in a toxic dance that always moves through two exhausting emotions: guilt and shame. They pull us down a slide toward dysthymia or depression, because there is no judge harsher than oneself when one feels they should be happy but isn't.

“Love and work,” Freud posited. For him, these were the two great pillars supporting psychological well-being and mental health: love as the capacity to invest emotional energy in another, and work as the great channel to satisfy our drives, feeling the pleasure of creation. The balance between personal enjoyment and social contribution seemed to be the formula for maturity.

And yet, we look inward and discover that these pillars, even when erected with great effort, are not enough. The void persists; it cannot be filled with promotions or new partners. It is a subjective abyss shouting at us from the seas of the unconscious.

The solitude that overwhelms Luis and Camila goes beyond the digital epidemic. It is a subjective solitude that can be felt in the middle of a party. It is the painful sensation of being radically alone with one’s own experience, incapable of being seen or understood in the depth of that dissatisfaction.

Psychoanalysis, in its search for the root of the symptom, traces back to childhood. Where does this hole that hurts so much come from?

Donald Winnicott saw the void as the echo of an early environmental failure. It is not a visible trauma, but a more subtle suffering: the child’s experience when their mother (or caregiver) fails to provide affective holding. There is a mismatch between the baby’s temperament and the caregiver’s personality. The mother is there, but she cannot adapt to the need, leaving the child in a nameless solitude.

André Green names this with a striking metaphor: the "Dead Mother" (psychically speaking). This is the mother who, though physically present, is absorbed in her own depression or introspection. The child encounters a massive emotional absence, a frozen affective mirror.

From this perspective, the adult feels empty because their capacity for affective investment remains withdrawn, frozen in the disappointment of that first failed encounter. It is a white trauma, a silent wound. Low self-esteem feeds on an unconscious and false belief: "If I had been better/easier, my mother would have been more present/happy/connected." This belief generates the guilt of not being enough.

But what if the void were not just a wound, but a condition?

Jacques Lacan confronts us with this idea: the human being is a being of structural lack (manque). We are born incomplete; our entry into language and culture seals us with a hole that, in part, will always remain. No object in the world—not Luis’s promotion, nor Camila’s family—can suture that lack, because it is precisely what defines us as desiring subjects.

However, the phantoms of perfection and wholeness haunt us, forcing us to insistently try to fill the unfillable. They condemn us to seek fulfillment in the "other" and to deny our vulnerabilities. Low self-esteem intensifies because we seek the impossible and, upon failing, we judge ourselves harshly, feeding the shame of being imperfect.

As Freud wrote: “One may say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the scheme of 'Creation'.”

Psychoanalysis does not promise wholeness. It promises something perhaps more difficult and, undoubtedly, more authentic: the capacity to live with our incomplete pieces, our inabilities, and our holes.

The work in therapy is not to plug the hole, but to integrate all parts of a person: the beautiful, the ugly, the chaotic. It is to give place to pain and incompleteness, so that this void becomes not agony, but the space of desire that keeps us moving.

The opportunity lies in debating those automatic conclusions that knock us down (“I am ungrateful,” “my life is a mess”). From the collisions between our external reality (what we have) and our internal reality (what we feel), the capacity to rest from that cycle of guilt and shame is born.

The final objective is simple and transformative: to keep loving and keep working, in spite of everything. Even if it requires constantly finding a different meaning for them, or even accepting that sometimes they will have no meaning at all. And that is enough.