Loneliness and solitude in gifted narrators: The legacies of childhood

Abstract

In this study, we attempt to provide insight into the complex interplay between loneliness/solitude and the writing gift from the early years of life. Theories about giftedness, research findings on loneliness/solitude, and on the links between giftedness and loneliness/solitude in childhood are associated with creative literary production. To further illustrate these associations, we briefly discuss loneliness and solitude in childhood, adult life, and work of four gifted writers: Hans Christian Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Beatrix Helen Potter. The theoretical framework of this study is twofold: various psychoanalytic formulations and Bruner’s social constructivist and intersubjective conceptualisation of the narrative gift. The main conclusion of this study is that gifted writers have, paradoxically, an intense experience of both painful and beneficial aloneness, which is the inevitable outcome of the writing gift but also becomes the inspiration and motive force for ars poetica.