Amazon.com description: Product Description: Dr. Ester Schaler Buchholz has written a book that gives us permission to have the peace and quiet we long for, and asserts the startling idea that "alonetime" is an essential developmental and biological need for both children and adults, for both creative personalities and just regular people. Alonetime is as necessary to create healthy relationships as the "quality time" together so many recommend. It gives us self-knowledge and the ability to control our bodies and even our lives. Drawing on biology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis, Buchholz reveals the depth and significance of this need and how different cultures have honored or denied it. A brief history of psychological and psychoanalytic theory traces how those disciplines have helped create a modern society in which relationships are all-important. However, groundbreaking research on babies in the womb demonstrates that they initiate alonetime and have a capacity for self-reliance. Case studies from the author's practice show how individuals, from childhood on, benefit from spending time alone. The book reveals that it is often a lack of solitude, not an abundance, that causes dependencies and disorders - sleeplessness, depression, drug use, alcoholism, and sometimes abusive relationships can result when we cannot find guilt-free alonetime. The Internet is examined as a way to find that elusive state. But are virtual reality and the glow of the computer screen places to lose ourselves or poor substitutes for real solitude? As we move into the twenty-first century and technology affects how we play, work, and communicate, what will imagination and genius look like? How will our inner lives change - andwill we have them at all? The Call of Solitude provides us not with prescriptions or answers, but with the illuminating knowledge that alonetime and attachment are complementary, not mutually exclusive.