Solitude: A Return to the Self - Softcover

Storr, Anthony

3.9

2,148 ratings by Goodreads

9780345358479: Solitude: A Return to the Self

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345358473 ISBN 13: 9780345358479

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1989

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A provocative and highly articulate meditation on solitude, Anthony Storr explores the connection between solitude and the creative personality. From the great to the obscure, Storr examines the uses that all kinds of people make of solitude in times of bereavement and depression, in escaping from the pressures of daily life, in communing with a higher power through prayer, and in finding and expressing their deepest selves.

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From the Back Cover:

In this brilliant and acclaimed book, the eminent psychiatrist Dr Anthony Storr challenges the widely held view that success in personal relationships is the only key to happiness. He argues persuasively that we pay far too little attention to some of the other great satisfactions of life – work and creativity. In a series of skilful biographical sketches, among them Beethoven, Henry James, Goya, Wittgenstein, Kipling and Beatrix Potter, he demonstrates how many of the creative geniuses of our civilisation have been solitary, by temperament of circumstance, and how the capacity to be alone is, even for those who are not creative, a sign of maturity.

'This book brings excellent news for those who, whatever their reasons for doing so, live alone... It is heartening to find a psychiatrist of Dr Storr's eminence diverging from the received wisdom'.
ANITA BROOKNER,' Spectator'

'This is a short book, but so rich in ideas, and presented with such a telling combination of gentleness and authority, that it is also exceptionally absorbing and thought-provoking'.
CLAIRE TOMALIN,' Observer'

'Storr is an incapable of writing an uninteresting paragraph'.
NORMAN STONE,' Sunday Times'

'This is an important, even revolutionary book. If it saves naturally non-sociable people from anxiety about ‘not belonging’ and enables them to come to terms with their solitude it will have done a notable human service'.
ERIC CHRISTIANSEN,' Independent'

About the Author:

Anthony Storr was a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and an Emeritus Fellow of Green College, Oxford. He was the author of numerous books, including The Integrity of the Personality, The Dynamics of Creation, The Essential Jung, and The Art of Psychotherapy. Dr. Storr died in 2001.

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