Solitude_A Return to the Self

by Anthony Storr

  We become much more free of other people, which in turn means that we become much more ourselves, our Real Selves (Horney), our authentic selves, our real identity.27

  Maslow’s attitude is thus very different from that of the object-relations theorists who tend to assume that the meaning of life is invariably bound up with interpersonal relationships.

  This book began with the observation that many highly creative people were predominantly solitary, but that it was nonsense to suppose that, because of this, they were necessarily unhappy or neurotic. Although man is a social being, who certainly needs interaction with others, there is considerable variation in the depth of the relationships which individuals form with each other. All human beings need interests as well as relationships; all are geared toward the impersonal as well as toward the personal. The events of early childhood, inherited gifts and capacities, temperamental differences, and a host of other factors may influence whether individuals tum predominantly toward others or toward solitude to find the meaning of their lives.

  The capacity to be alone was adumbrated as a valuable resource, which facilitated learning, thinking, innovation, coming to terms with change, and the maintenance of contact with the inner world of the imagination. We saw that, even in those whose capacity for making intimate relationships had been damaged, the development of creative imagination could exercise a healing function. Examples were also given of creative individuals whose chief concern was with making sense and order out of life rather than with relationships with others; a concern with the impersonal which, we suggested, tended to increase with age. Man’s adaptation to the world is largely governed by the development of the imagination and hence of an inner world of the psyche which is necessarily at variance with the external world. Perfect happiness, the oceanic feeling of complete harmony between inner and outer worlds, is only transiently possible. Man is constantly in search of happiness but, by his very nature, is precluded from finally or permanently achieving it either in interpersonal relationships or in creative endeavour. Throughout the book, it was noted that some of the most profound and healing psychological experiences which individuals encounter take place internally, and are only distantly related, if at all, to interaction with other human beings.

  The happiest lives are probably those in which neither interpersonal relationships nor impersonal interests are idealized as the only way to salvation. The desire and pursuit of the whole must comprehend both aspects of human nature.

  The epigraph of this chapter is taken from The Prelude. It is fitting that Wordsworth should also provide its end.

  When from our better selves we have too long

  Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,

  Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,

  How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.28

  * Now published as Symbols of Transformation; Collected Works, V (London, 1956).

  †The Freud-Jung Letter, edited by William McGuire, translated by Ralph Manheim and R.F.C. Hull (london, 1974).

  References

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings, edited by G. Birkbeck Hill (London, 1900), pp. 239–41.

  2. Lytton Strachey, Portraits in Miniature (London, 1931), p. 154.

  3. Edward Gibbon, op. cit., p. 236, note 3.

  4. Ibid., p. 244.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (London, 1985), p. 34.

  2. Sigmund Freud, Letter to Pfister (1910), quoted in Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud, II (London, 1955), p. 497.

  3. Sigmund Freud, ‘Transference’, Lecture XXVII in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Standard Edition, edited by James Strachey, 24 volumes, XVI (London, 1963), pp. 431–7.

  4. Peter Marris, ‘Attachment and Society’, in The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior, edited by C. Murray Parkes and J. Stevenson-Hinde (London, 1982), p. 185.

  5. Robert S. Weiss, ‘Attachment in Adult Life’, in The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior, op. cit., p. 174.

  6. John Bowlby, Loss, Sadness and Depression; Attachment and Loss, III (London, 1980), p. 442.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Bernard Berenson, Sketch for a Self-Portrait (Toronto, 1949), p. 18.

  2. A.L. Rowse, A Cornish Childhood (London, 1942), pp. 16–18.

  3. Donald W. Winnicott, ‘The Capacity to be Alone’, in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London, 1969), p. 29.

  4. Ibid., p. 33.

  5. IM., p. 34.

  6. Ibid., p. 34.

  7. William C. Dement, Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep (San Francisco, 1972), p. 93.

  8. Stanley Palombo, Dreaming and Memory (New York, 1978), p. 219.

  9. David Stcnhouse, The Evolution of Intelligence (London, 1973), p. 31.

  10. Ibid., p. 67.

  11. Ibid., p. 78.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement, second edition (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 158–9.

  2. Loring M. Danforth, The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton, 1982), pp. 143–4.

  3. Ibid., p. 144.

  4. Richard E. Byrd, Alone (London, 1958), ?. 7.

  5. Ibid., p. 9.

  6. Ibid., pp. 62–3.

  7. Ibid., p. 206.

  8. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London, 1903), p. 419.

  9. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Standard Edition, edited by James Strachey, 24 volumes, XXI (London, 1961), pp. 64–5.

  10. Ibid., p. 67.

  11. Ibid., p. 72.

  12. Ibid., p. 72.

  13. Richard Wagner, in Wagner on Music and Drama: A Selection from Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, arranged by Alben Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn, translated by H. Ashton Ellis (London, 1970), pp. 272–3.

  14. Glin Bennet, Beyond Endurance (London, 1983), pp. 166–7.

  15. Christiane Ritter, translated by J. Degras, Woman in the Polar Night (London, 1954), p. 144.

  16. John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Noel Douglas replica edition (London, 1927) of Taylor and Hessey edition (London, 1820), pp. 110–11.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Norval Morris, The Future of Imprisonment (Chicago, 1974), p. 4.

  2. Ida Koch, ‘Mental and Social Sequelae of Isolation’, in The Expansion of European Prison Systems, Working Papers in European Criminology No. 7, edited by Bill Rolston and Mike Tomlinson (Belfast, 1986), pp. 119–29.

  3. Lawrence E. Hinkle and Harold G. Wolff, ‘Communist Interrogation and Indoctrination of “Enemies of the States”, AMA Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry (1956), Vol. 76, pp. 115–74.

  4. Ibid., p. 12.

  5. Ibid., p. 25.

  6. Edith Bone, Seven Years Solitary (London, 1957).

  7. Christopher Burney, Solitary Confinement (London, 1952).

  8. Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (London, 1979), p. 103.

  9. Yehudi Menuhin, Theme and Variations (New York, 1972), p. 103.

  10. Quoted in Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (London, 1978), p. 117.

  11. Ibid., p. 124.

  12. André Malraux, Saturn: an Essay on Goya (London, 1957), p. 25.

  13. Francisco Goya, quoted in Kenneth Clark, The Romantic Rebellion (London, 1973), p. 95. ’

  14. Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor, psychological Survival (New York, 1972), p. 110.

  15. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordcal, 1850–1859, 5 volume (Princeton, 1983), II, p. 122.

  16. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–44 (New York, 1953), p. 235. Quoted in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London, 1964), p. 119, note.

  17. Arthur Koestler, Kaleidoscope (London, 1981), pp. 208–15.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, in Samuel Johnson, edited by Donald Greene (Oxford, 1984), p. 387.

  2. Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, Standard Edition, edited by James Strachey, 24 volume
s IX (London, 1959), p. 146.

  3. Ibid., p. 145.

  4. Sigmund Freud, ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’, Standard Edition, XII (London, 1958), p. 219.

  5. Francisco Goya, Epigraph to Los Caprichos.

  6. Sigmund Freud, op. cit., XII, p. 224.

  7. Donald W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’ (1951), in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (London, 1975), pp. 229–42.

  8. S. Provence and R. C. Lipton, Infants m Institutions: A Comparison of their Development with Family-Reared Infants during the First Year of Life (New York, 1962).

  9. Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York, 1971), p. 65.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. Anthony Storr, ‘The Concept of Cure’, in PsychoAnalysis Observed, edited by Charles Rycroft (London, 1966), p. 72.

  2. Germain Bazin, translated by F. Scarfe, A Concise History of Art (London, 1962), p. 11.

  3. Herbert Read, Icon and Idea (London, 1955), p. 27.

  4. Germain Bazin, op. cit., p. 24.

  5. Raymond Firth, Elements of Social Organization, third edition (London, 1961), p. 173.

  6. Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual (London, 1972), p. 88.

  7. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance m Italy, second edition (Oxford, 1981), p. 81.

  8. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England, 1975), p. 564.

  9. Raymond Firth, op. cit., p. 171.

  10. Edmund Leach, edited by F. Kermode, Social Anthropology (London, 1982), pp. 139–40.

  11. Peter Abbs, ‘The Development of Autobiography in Western Culture: from Augustine to Rousseau’ (unpublished thesis, University of Sussex, 1986), p. 130.

  12. Ibid., pp. 131–2.

  13. Bruno Bettelheim, The Children of the Dream (London, 1969), p. 212.

  14.Urie Bronfenbrenner, Two Worlds of Childhood: US and USSR (London, 1971), pp. 10–11.

  15. Matthew 22: 37, 38.

  16. Christopher Brooke, The Monastic World, 1000–1300 (London, 1974), pp. 114–15.

  CHAPTER 7

  1. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, edited by Aniela Jaffe, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (London, 1963), p. 170.

  2. C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Collected Works, edited by Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler, translated by R. F. C. Hull, 20 volumes, VII (London, 1953), p. 40.

  3. IM, p. 41.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, translated by Michael Bullock (London, 1963), p. 5.

  6. Ibid., p. 4.

  7. Ibid., p. 36.

  8. Howard Gardner, Artful Scribbles (New York, 1980), p. 47.

  9. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Standard Edition, edited by James Strachey, 24 volumes, XIV (London, 1957), pp. 243–58.

  10. Mary Main and Donna R. Weston, ‘Avoidance of the Attachment Figure in Infancy: Descriptions and Interpretations’ in The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior, edited by Colin Murray-Parkes and Joan Stevenson-Hinde (London, 1982), p. 46.

  11. Ibid., p. 46.

  12. Ibid., p. 52.

  13. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, translated by James Stem and Elizabeth Duckworth, edited by Erich Heller and Jürgen Born (London, 1974), p. 271.

  14. Ibid., pp. 155–6.

  15. Erich Heller, Franz Kafka (New York, 1975), p. 15.

  16. Quoted by Allan Blunden in ‘A Chronology of Kafka’s Life’, in The World of Franz Kafka, edited by J. P. Stern (London, 1980), p. 28.

  17. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, second edition (London, 1950), p. 211.

  CHAPTER 8

  1. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (London, 1946), pp. 54–5.

  2. C. P. Snow, Trollope (London, 1975), p. 9.

  3. Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens (London, 1987), pp. 138–41.

  4. Margaret Lane, The Tale of Beatrix Potter (London, 1970), p. 9.

  5. Ibid., p. 38.

  6. Ibid., p. 50.

  7. Humphrey Carpenter, op. cit., p. 138.

  8. Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear (London, 1985), p. 14.

  9. Ibid., p. 107.

  10. Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 50.

  11. Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (London, 1977), p. 18.

  12. Ibid., p. 276.

  13. A. J. Languth, Saki (Oxford, 1982), p. 14.

  14. The Bodley Head Saki, edited by J. W. Lambert (London, 1963), p. 59.

  15. Frances Donaldson, P. G. Wodehouse (London, 1982), p. 46.

  16. Writers at Work, fifth series, edited by George Plimpton (Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 11.

  17. Frances Donaldson, op. cit., p. 44.

  18. Ibid., p. 50.

  19. Ibid., p. 3.

  20. Writers at Work, first series, introduced by Malcolm Cowley (London, 1958), p. 132.

  CHAPTER 9

  1. Paul V. Ragan and Thomas H. McGlashan, ‘Childhood Parental Death and Adult Psychopathology’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 143:2 (February 1986), pp. 153–7.

  2. George W. Brown and Tirril Harris, Social Origins of Depression (London, 1978), p. 240.

  3. C. Perris, S. Holmgren, L. von Knorring and H. Perris, ‘Parental Loss by Death in the Early Childhood of Depressed Patients and of their Healthy Siblings’, British Journal of Psychiatry (1986), 148, pp. 165–9.

  4. George W. Brown et al., op. rit., p. 240.

  5. John A. Birtchnell, ‘The Personality Characteristics of Early-bereaved Psychiatric Patients’, Social Psychiatry, 10, pp. 97–103.

  6. Roger Brown, Social Psychology, The Second Edition, (New York, 1984), pp. 644–5.

  7. George W. Brown et al., op. cit., p. 285.

  8. Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford, 1980), p. 184.

  9. Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, v, in The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (London, 1899), p. 248.

  10. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, edited by Holbrook Jackson (London, 1972), p. 20.

  11. Robert Bernard Martin, op. cit., p. 4.

  12. Ibid., p. 10.

  13. Ibid., p. 140.

  14. Andrew Brink, Loss and Symbolic Repair (Ontario, 1977).

  15. Andrew Brink, Creativity as Repair (Ontario, 1982).

  16. David Aberbach, Loss and Separation in Bialik and Wordsworth, Prooftexts (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), Vol. 2, pp. 197–208.

  17. David Aberbach, At the Handles of the Lock (Oxford, 1984).

  18. David Cecil, The Stricken Deer, or The Life of Cowper (London, 1943).

  19. William Cowper, The Poetical Works of William Cowper, edited by H. S. Milford (Oxford, 1934), Olney Hymn I, lines 9–12, p. 433.

  20. William Cowper, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, edited by James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 volumes, II (Oxford, 1981), letter to Joseph Hill, November 1784, p. 294.

  21. William Cowper, Works, op. cit.. lines 17–20, lines 118–21, p. 39, p. 3%.

  22. William Cowper, ‘Lines Written During a Period of Insanity’, lines 1–12, Work, op. cit., pp. 289–90.

  23. William Cowper, Works, op. cit., Olney Hymn XVIII, lines 9–12, p. 444.

  24. William Cowper, Works, op. cit., ‘The Shrubbery’, lines 5–12, p. 292.

  25. Samuel T. Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’, lines 31–8. The Portable Coleridge, edited by I. A. Richards (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 170.

  26. David Cecil, op. cit., p. 206.

  27. William Cowper, Works, op. cit.. The Task, III, lines 373–8, p. 172.

  28. Stephen Spender, World Within World (London, 1951), p. 6.

  29. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, edited by M. B. Forman (Oxford, 1935), letter 134, p. 353.

  30.David Aberbach, Loss and Separation in Bialik and Wordsworth, Prooftexts (1982) Vol. 2, p. 198.

  31. Andrew Brink, Loss and Symbolic Repair (Ontario, 1977), p. 1
15.

  32. Ibid., p. 117–18.

  33. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by V. E. Watts (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 66–7.

  34. N. J. C. Andreasen and A. Canter, ‘The Creative Writer’, Comprehensive Psychiatry, 15 (1974), pp. 123–31.

  35. Kay R. Jamison, ‘Mood Disorders and Seasonal Patterns in top British Writers and Artists’, unpublished data.

  CHAPTER 10

  1. Anthony Storr, The Integrity of the Personality (London, 1960), p. 24.

  2. Ibid., p. 27.

  3. Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure?, edited by Arnold Goldberg with the collaboration of Paul Stepansky (Chicago, 1984), p. 109.

  4. Ibid., p. 43.

  5. Ronald D. Laing, The Divided Self (London, 1960).

  6. Wystan H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, edited by Edward Mendelson, XLI, ‘September 1, 1939’, line 88 (London, 1977), p. 246.

  7. Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London, 1968), p. 100.

  8. Jerrold N. Moore, Edward Elgar (Oxford, 1984), p. vii.

  9. Morris N. Eagle, ‘Interests as Object Relations’, in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought (1981), 4, pp. 527–65.

  10. Ibid., p. 532, note 2.

  11. Ibid., pp. 537–8.

  12. Thomas De Quincey, ‘The Last Days of Kant’, in The English Mail-Coach and Other Essays, introduced by John Hill Burton (London, 1912), pp. 162–209.

  13. Ben-Ami Scharfstein, The Philosophers, Their Lives and the Nature of their Thought (Oxford, 1980).

  14. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London, 1946), p. 731.

  15. Thomas De Quincey, op. cit., p. 170.

  16. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir, with a Biographical Sketch by Georg Henrik von Wright (Oxford, 1958), p. 4.

  17. Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914–1944, Vol. II (London, 1968), pp. 98–9.