Solitude

By: Anthony Storr

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Paperback | 7 April 1997

At a Glance

Paperback
224 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
26.7 x 17.2 x 5.4

Paperback

$29.75

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'Brings excellent news for those who, whatever their reasons for doing so, live alone ... Heartening' Anita Brookner, Spectator

'Storr is an incapable of writing an uninteresting paragraph' Sunday Times'

How can we find value in spending time alone?

Many of the history's geniuses were, by nature or circumstance, often solitary. Beethoven, Beatrix Potter, Henry James, Wittgenstein, Kipling. In this book, acclaimed psychiatrist Dr Anthony Storr explores the psychological value of spending time alone. How can we reconnect with what matters to us outside of our social relationships? How can we find an emotional difference between being alone and being lonely?

Insightful and inspiring, this is a book that can help us feel more comfortable spending time alone, and show how to use solitude to focus on our interests, values and creative energies beyond the social sphere.

Industry Reviews

A lecturer in psychiatry (Oxford) looks at the psychotherapeutic virtues of solitude. Some of Storr's earlier books have dealt with the psychology of art (The Dynamics of Creation) and aggression (Human Aggression). Here he retains his viewpoint (a sort of liberated Freudianism, with heavy doses of Jung), his theme (the way in which creative people achieve self-integration), and even some favorite case-studies (Franz Kafka, for example). His contention - which runs against the grain of classic psychoanalytic doctrine but will come as no surprise to most folks - is that self-realization can be found through isolation as well as through family and society. Storr marshals a formidable array of psychologists - Gellner, Winnicott, Bowlby, and Gardner among them - to buttress his argument, which veers from insight (his criticisms of Freud) to technical jargon (usually well explained) to platitude ("human beings change and develop as life goes on"; "contemporary Western culture makes the peace of solitude difficult to attain"). More intriguing are his psychobiographies of artists and thinkers - e.g., Beethoven, Kant, Wittgenstein, Beatrix Potter - which demonstrate how isolation can trigger or strenghten creative skills. A humane, sensible, rather drab approach to a largely unexplored subject. While StoWs psychoanalytical spectacles have a nondogmatic, fairly wide field-of-view, much of his analysis will appeal only to specialists. (Kirkus Reviews)

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