Book Review

PUTTING THE WORLD ON HOLD

Mind.'', DANIEL GOLEMAN, Daniel Goleman, who writes about psychology for The New York Times, is the author of ''Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception'' and ''The Meditative

1988

Overview

Edward Gibbon called solitude ''the school of genius.'' And yet psychology pays scant attention to its value and uses. It is a major omission, given that acts of genius borne of solitude have shaped world history - Buddha sitting under the bo tree, Karl Marx toiling away in the great library of the British Museum, Sigmund Freud sequestered in his study writing ''The Interpretation of Dreams.'' Dr. [Anthony Storr]'s point is deceptively simple: psychoanalytic thinkers underrate solitude and overrate relationships in gauging the ingredients of contentment. Solitude is the natural arena for most creative effort, and people who are alone need not be lonely and unhappy. Solitary pursuits, whether writing poetry, gardening, speculating in stocks or breeding carrier pigeons, ''play a greater part in the economy of human happiness than modern psycho-analysts and their followers allow,'' Dr. Storr writes. It is against the influential ''object relations'' school of psychoanalytic thought that Dr. Storr's arguments are directed. The seminal work of the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby and others reoriented the focus of Freudian theory from the need to control primal impulses to the ways an infant's earliest experiences of attachments shape all later intimate relations.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: GOLEMAN, DANIEL / Storr, Anthony