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Esther Schaler Buchholz has written a book in which she focuses on the importance of aloneness, as opposed to loneliness, in the growth, development, and maturation of the individual and society. This is not primarily a psychoanalytic text; it is, rather, a volume that utilizes historical, sociological, ethological, biological, and social psychological sources (p. 21) to make the argument that it is not necessarily attachment, the major variable used in contemporary scientific and academic studies, that accounts for an individual's growth and society's major accomplishments. It is alone time that is essential for the advance of an individual and society and for the peacefulness of the nations of the world.
The individual, says Buchholz, has been absorbed by and has been said to advance primarily because of his or her patterns of and preference for living in a world characterized by the degree and type of attachment maintained with other human beings. Aloneness is explored in this book in terms of its relation to an autistic world, where the individual is isolated from his or her fellow human beings, a world in which the advance of this culture and of the individual is seen as depending on the state of one's relationships rather than one's capacity and desire for solitude.
Psychological, and especially psychoanalytic, studies are concerned, for example, with the individual's object relations. Maturation is evaluated in the context of the individual's relation to other human beings. Even