The Psychology of Solitude: TWO BOOKS
The Call of Solitude: Alonetime in a World of Attachment, by Ester Schaler Buchholz. Boston, Beacon Press, 1995.
This book of 350+ pages by a psychotherapist concentrates on the psychology of self and the issues of what would be called elsewhere, I think, self-esteem. The focus is the necessity of recognizing the importance of the individual in distinguishing that self from society, the group, the other. The state of mind or product is what the author calls alonetime.
Anecdotes cram the book's pages, giving us a full panoply of examples and scenarios, never too technical but always from a psychologist's point of view, including the author's own cases. There is no philosophical, cultural, or spiritual angle to solitude here. At times, the stories overwhelm the insights, the most fruitful of which would lead us to a recognition of what the foundation of solitude is, so that the individual can be justified in seeking alonetime.
Though it cannot be seen as a fault, the book presumes to reduce the subject to psychology. Granted that the justification is presented as psychological because not everyone is an intellectual, so the book offers this useful bridge. But to find the deeper context of solitude, readers will need to pursue the generous bibliography of this book plus a few perennial classics.
Migrations to Solitude, by Sue Halpern. New York, Vintage, 1993.
The cover of this book offers the subtitle "The Quest for Privacy in a Crowded World," which highlights a distinction the author intends between solitude and privacy. Here solitude is largely a distressful emotional and physical state while privacy is the safeguarded persona free to pursue what Buchholz (see above) calls alonetime.
The people highlighted in Halpern's
book have been pushed into forced solitude because of their marginal social
or psychological status: urban poor, drug addicts, terminally ill,
domestically abused, people suffering a personal tragedy. They have lost
their privacy not in the narrow legal sense but in the emotional and
psychological sense.
Only one chapter features an elderly couple living as hermits in upper New York State. Also, the author elects a day of alonetime near a favorite lake and tells us about it. However, the portraits of isolation and anguish, though described with control and humaneness, are hardly paeans to the virtues of solitude. Readers seeking a positive portrait of solitude will find this book bleak and ironic.
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