Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Suggesting that our need for time alone is as powerfully driven as our need for attachment, Buchholz, a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist and professor at New York University, makes an eloquent plea for a balance to our tell-all-immediately modern-day culture. Her description of solitude includes silence, a slower pace and quiet vistas (internal and social) to balance the sensory and often relational overload that marks today's society. Her rigorously assembled arguments draw from biological, psychological, sociological, historical and cultural sources, and are organized into three sections. Part One distinguishes being alone from being lonely and addresses the importance of "alonetime" in human development, examining the work of John Bowlby, Margaret Mahler, Jean Piaget, Melanie Klein and others. Part Two discusses more recent research, including studies of intrauterine experience. Part Three investigates the role of "alonetime" in relationships (romantic, psychoanalytic, familial and communal), focusing particularly on the interplay of intimacy and solitude. Buchholz's wide-ranging discussion, slanted toward professionals but accessible to interested general readers, may overreach on occasion, but she is often convincing in her timely and provocative advocacy of "alonetime." (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, and professor, Buchholz has written a comprehensive study of human solitude or, as she calls it, "alonetime." She feels that today's culture overvalues attachment and neglects the importance of time alone. Using case studies, stories, poetry, and other sources, Buchholz shows how alonetime has always been important and that the lack of it in today's frenzied U.S. culture increases stress and depression. Unfortunately, in an effort to include all her interesting quotations and stories, Buchholz sometimes squeezes them into places where they don't belong. Although each chapter attempts to cover defined areas, the text wanders and sometimes repeats itself. Thus, while this important work brings together nearly everything ever thought or written about solitude, it is not as well organized or written as it could have been. Recommended for research libraries.Elizabeth Caulfield Felt, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman, Wash. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A wide-ranging study of solitude, presenting it as a basic human need, one as necessary to psychic health and creativity as the social interactions emphasized by psychology's many ``attachment'' theorists. Buchholz, who directs New York University's Master's Program in the Psychology of Parenthood, wants to ``unshackle aloneness from its negative position as kith and kin to loneliness. Remove it from battles with bonding, attachment, and relationships. Make its message part of the social norm! Then uplift it from its lonely place on the mental health shelf.'' She succeeds admirably by examining the role of ``alonetime'' (a neologism she feels is needed, given the negative connotations many social scientists assign to ``solitude'') in everything from anthropological studies of other cultures to embryology, from pediatric medicine and child psychology to existentialist philosophy. Included are some fascinating observations on individuals who manage to survive, and even to thrive, during periods of extreme solitude, from the experiences of autistic children to those of hostages who have endured long periods of being blindfolded and isolated. She laments many of her patients' inability to grow inwardly by fostering their self-reflective and imaginative lives. Buchholz stumbles on occasion in romanticizing solitude, as in her claim that the autistic child possesses ``an exquisite ability to self-regulate,'' an unsupported claim at best. And while she properly warns of contemporary Americans' growing addiction to E-mail, computer culture in general, and other forms of external stimuli, she carries it to a neo-Luddite extreme in claiming that ``we are paying the price for the current frenetic demands in today's culture through being unwittingly led by technology into stupors.'' And the book could have used tightening. Her study, however, is on balance immensely interesting and informative, and accessible to the nonprofessional. Buchholz demonstrates irrefutably that ``without solitude existing as a safe place, a place for long sojourns and self- discovery, we lose an important sense of being self-regulating individuals.''
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