There is food in the fridge and the rent went through on time. You answered everything that needed answering. You finished the week, and anybody watching you would have said you were doing fine.
Then you sit down at the end of it and notice that you feel almost nothing. Good news does not lift you, rest does not restore you, and the people you love feel farther away than they did before.
It is not exactly sadness. Sadness is usually about something: a loss, a disappointment, a person you miss. This feeling is harder to name because nothing has visibly gone wrong. Your practical needs were met, but you went too long without warm attention, touch, or the feeling that another person was genuinely glad you were there. Many years ago, a doctor visiting hospital wards saw the same gap in babies, in a much starker form: they were fed, but nobody held them.
What if you don’t already know what you’ll find?
One thing before the doctor’s story, because it changes how you will read it.
When you look at yourself, or at anybody else, there are two ways to go about it. You can go in already sure of what you’re going to find, or you can go in assuming there’s something there you haven’t seen yet.
The first way is faster and almost entirely blind. You end up seeing only what you walked in believing, and quietly bending everything else until it fits the shape you brought with you. The second way is slower, and it’s the only one that ever turns up anything worth having. You go in admitting you don’t know, and so you come out with something you didn’t have before.
So when you look at yourself or anyone else, the most important work isn’t collecting new ideas. It’s setting aside the ones you already have. Read the rest of this without deciding in advance what you will find.
Why were well-fed babies wasting away?
The doctor was René Spitz. He ran a children’s ward himself, and he went from one hospital or children’s home to another, watching infants. In some of those places he kept seeing something that made no medical sense at all.
The babies were being fed properly, on schedule, as much as they needed. Breast milk, formula, whatever was on hand. And they were fading anyway.
No illness explained it, and nothing was missing from their diet. Their bodies simply withered: they got thinner and smaller and quieter, week after week, and some of them died. On paper these babies were well cared for, yet they were dying in clean rooms with full bottles beside them.
Nobody could give a reason for it. The cause was real, and it was right there in the room, but nobody had seen it. Spitz found it by going from place to place and watching the babies.
This wasting came to be known as hospitalism, because it kept turning up in hospitals and children’s homes.
Same formula — so why were babies in other wards plump?
Here’s the observation that cracked it open. In some places nearly every baby wilted, while in others the babies were round and loud and thriving. Same formula, out of the same tins.
Spitz compared the two kinds of places. They differed in a good many ways, and one of those differences mattered more than all the rest.
In the wards where the babies faded, the bottle was propped up in the crib and the baby drank alone. In the wards where the babies thrived, a nurse lifted the baby out and held it while it ate.
The nutrition going in was identical. The difference was a pair of arms.
Why does being held count for so much?
A baby can’t understand the idea of being loved; it has no words yet. What it has is skin, and love reaches it first as touch: being picked up, being stroked, being fussed over by someone whose attention, for that moment, is all on the baby. Through that touch the baby’s body takes in a message: something warm is holding me, something keeps coming back for me, so I must be worth coming back for.
Repeated care gives a baby its first sense of self. Before the child can think “I matter,” the body learns it through being picked up, soothed, fed, and answered when it cries. Psychologists call this first, bodily sense of self the physical self. Whatever you later come to believe about your own worth is built on top of it.
When no one holds the baby or answers its cries, food alone cannot give it that experience. An adult who goes without warmth still has ways to react: turning bitter, demanding, or withdrawn, or going numb. A baby has none of these yet. All it can take in is that it is in distress and no one comes, and so the lack shows up in its body. That is the wasting Spitz saw: babies who were fed but not held grew thinner and quieter, and some of them died.
If babies waste away without warmth, why are you still standing?
Because you are not a baby in a crib any more. Your first sense of self was built in childhood. It may have been built unevenly in places, but it is there, and being left alone all day no longer kills you. Nobody has to notice you or love you today for your heart to keep beating, and an adult can go a remarkably long time with no warmth at all and stay medically fine.
What changes instead is your capacity to feel connected and alive.
You still go to work, answer emails, and say the right thing at dinner. But your feelings are slow to come, pleasure fades quickly, and other people begin to feel distant. In a baby, deprivation can show up in the body. In an adult, the daily routine may continue while interest, warmth, and emotional responsiveness gradually weaken.
You notice it in small ways, if you notice it at all. Weeks blur together. Nothing quite lands. Good news arrives and you register it the way you’d register a fact about somebody else. You can’t remember the last time anything reached you.
And nothing shows. That’s the part that makes it dangerous. A broken arm gets a cast and a fever gets a thermometer, but there is nothing here to point at, so nobody thinks to ask — including you.
Why won’t the zombie films stop coming?
Imagine someone who has died inside, and ask what they would look like to anyone watching. You already have the picture. You’ve seen it hundreds of times. It walks around. It eats. There’s nobody home behind the eyes.
Zombie films never go away. A series gets a fourth film and a fifth, and then a brand-new one comes out. People keep making them because people keep turning up to watch, and a story only gets that big when it shows us something about ourselves that we can’t say out loud.
The audience isn’t there for the makeup. Something in them recognizes that figure: a body that keeps going with nobody inside. If there weren’t so many people going hollow inside perfectly ordinary lives, that whole genre would have burned out long ago. Your own inner deadness ends up on a screen where you can look straight at it for two hours and never once realize what you’re looking at. What people can’t say about themselves, they will pay to sit and watch.
How much attention does a person actually need?
Transactional analysis, a school of psychotherapy, has a name for any small sign from another person that says, “I see you, and you matter to me.” It calls such a sign a stroke, in the sense of stroking a baby, not the medical kind. A hand on the shoulder counts, and so does your name said by somebody who meant it. People need a steady supply of these, roughly the way we need meals.
The amount matters too: neither too little nor too much.
Too little attention leaves you feeling unnoticed and emotionally depleted. Too much attention — constant questions, monitoring, touching, or demands for a response — removes privacy and puts the body on alert. Your jaw tightens, your thoughts narrow, and ordinary contact begins to feel intrusive.
When that tension has nowhere to go, you may snap at the nearest person even when they did not cause it. The need is not for the most attention possible. It is for steady contact that lets you feel noticed without making you feel watched or controlled.
Small signs like these are harder to come by now than they used to be, too. Notice how much of an ordinary day can pass without a single one. Coffee ordered through an app, groceries through self-checkout, work conducted in a chat window with people you have never stood next to. You can get from Monday to Friday without one person saying your name out loud, and none of it feels like a loss while it’s happening. It feels like convenience.
So exchange one stroke with someone today. Only one, and it doesn’t have to be a big one.
Say somebody’s name and add a sentence that’s genuinely about them — the barista, a coworker, your sister. Not a compliment you’d hand to anybody, but something you noticed about that particular person. If there’s honestly nobody within reach today, put your hand on your own arm and run it slowly down once. It will feel ridiculous, and you should do it anyway. The babies who thrived on those wards weren’t given a treatment. They were held.
References
- Spitz, R. A. (1945). Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 53–74.
- Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. New York: Basic Books.
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board