Quotes from Anthony Storr

Music structures time. By imposing order, music ensures that the emotions aroused by a particular event peak at the same moment.

we may say that reading Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, and Tolstoy enriches our understanding of reality, and therefore enlarges our capacity to enjoy life and enhances our adaptation to it. Shakespeare, Keats, and the other great poets reveal the inner nature of the world and sharpen our sensibilities because their perceptions and their gift for metaphor make it possible for us to transcend our own limited vision by sharing theirs.

Participating in music, whether as performer or listener, brings us into contact with greatness, and leaves traces of that greatness as permanent impressions. I share Plato's conviction that musical training is a potent instrument 'because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul'.

they are often milestones on the journey toward

Music can order our muscular system. I believe that it is also able to order our mental contents.

Man is a creature inescapably, and often unhappily, divided; and the divisions within him recurrently impel the use of his imagination to make new syntheses. The creative consequences of his imaginative strivings may never make him whole; but they constitute his deepest consolations and his greatest glories.

Intimate attachments are a hub around which a person's life revolves, not necessarily the hub.

But attachment theory, in my view, does less than justice to the importance of work, to the emotional significance of what goes on in the mind of the individual when he is alone, and, more especially, to the central place occupied by the imagination in those who are capable of creative achievement. Intimate attachments are a hub around which a person's life revolves, not necessarily the hub.

Freud's somewhat puritanical vision was that proper, mature adaptation to the world was governed by deliberate thought and rational planning. He would not have countenanced our present proposition: that an inner world of phantasy is part of man's biological endowment, and that it is the inevitable discrepancy between this inner world and the outer world that compels men to become inventive and imaginative.

The existence of such objects also supports the suggestion made in the Introduction that human beings are directed toward the impersonal as well as toward the personal. These very early manifestations of investing impersonal objects with significance are evidence that man was not born for love alone. The meaning attaching to such objects may later become invested in objects of scientific enquiry, or in any of the manifold aspects of the external world which engage adult attention.

No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.' De Quincey

Hobbies and interests are often aspects of a human being which most clearly define his individuality, and make him the person he is.

Bowlby's statement that intimate attachments are the hub around which a person's life revolves, and Marris's assertion that specific relationships embody most crucially the meaning of a person's life, leave out of account not only interests, which may be crucially important, but also the need which many people feel for some scheme, religion, philosophy, or ideology which makes sense of life.

As we have seen, many creative activities are predominantly solitary. They are concerned with self-realization and self-development in isolation, or with finding some coherent pattern in life. The degree to which these creative activities take priority in the life of an individual varies with his personality and talents. Everyone needs some human relationships; but everyone also needs some kind of fulfilment which is relevant to himself alone.

What he also records is his delight in discovering that, if only adults left him alone, he could, through reading, escape into a world of his own.

The capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required. After major alterations in circumstances, fundamental reappraisal of the significance and meaning of existence may be needed. In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.

Our expectation that satisfying intimate relationships should, ideally, provide happiness and that, if they do not, there must be something wrong with those relationships, seems to be exaggerated. . . It may be our idealization of interpersonal relationships in the West that causes marriage, supposedly the most intimate tie, to be so unstable. If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears.

Coming to terms with loss is a difficult, painful, and largely solitary process which may be delayed rather than aided by distractions. Any rituals which underline the fact that bereavement is a profoundly traumatic event are helpful.

That solitude promotes insight as well as change has been recognized by great religious leaders, who have usually retreated from the world before returning to it to share what has been revealed to them. Although accounts vary

Jesus, according to both St Matthew and St Luke, spent forty days in the wilderness undergoing temptation by the devil before returning to proclaim his message of repentance and salvation

St Catherine of Siena spent three years in seclusion in her little room in the Via Benincasa during which she underwent a series of mystical experiences before entering upon an active life of teaching and preaching.

Both distinguished musicians are claiming a special fundamental significance for the Western tonal system, on the grounds that it is rooted in a natural order of things

In the next chapter, we shall look at some aspects of 'sensory deprivation'. As noise abatement enthusiasts have discovered, its opposite, sensory overload, is a largely disregarded problem. The current popularity of techniques like 'transcendental meditation' may represent an attempt to counterbalance the absence of silence and solitude which the modern urban environment inflicts upon us.

The desire for solitude as a means of escape from the pressure of ordinary life and as a way of renewal is vividly illustrated by Admiral Byrd's account of manning an advanced weather base in the Antarctic during the winter of 1934. He insisted on doing this alone.