id="u3563b23c-0f6a-5fef-a3b0-4e3b386a4b88">
ANTHONY STORR
SOLITUDE
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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This edition 1997
Copyright © Anthony Storr 1988
Anthony Storr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006543497
Ebook Edition © MAY 2018 ISBN: 9780007385669
Version: 2018-07-09
Contents
1 – The Significance of Human Relationships
6 – The Significance of the Individual
8 – Separation, Isolation, and the Growth of Imagination
9 – Bereavement, Depression and Repair
12 – The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole
‘Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius; and the uniformity of a work denotes the hand of a single artist.’
Edward Gibbon
Gibbon is surely right. The majority of poets, novelists, composers, and, to a lesser extent, of painters and sculptors, are bound to spend a great deal of their time alone, as Gibbon himself did. Current wisdom, especially that propagated by the various schools of psychoanalysis, assumes that man is a social being who needs the companionship and affection of other human beings from cradle to grave. It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption. For example, many of the world’s greatest thinkers have not reared families or formed close personal ties. This is true of Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. Some of these men of genius had transient affairs with other men or women: others, like Newton, remained celibate. But none of them married, and most lived alone for the greater part of their lives.
Creative talent of a major kind is not widely bestowed. Those who possess it are often regarded with awe and envy because of their gifts. They also tend to be thought of as peculiar; odd human beings who do not share the pains and pleasures of the average person. Does this difference from the average imply abnormality in the sense of psychopathology? More particularly, is the predilection of the creative person for solitude
