FREEDOM NOW!!

Creative Solitude: A Photographic Essay

Vicissitudes of Solitude: Inner and Outer

A Sense of Internal Peace

Solitude emphasizes the value of allowing us to formulate our feelings, thoughts and behaviors away from the influence of others. One seeks solitude, because our personalities are not unlike permeable membranes. When actively involved with mutual interpersonal relatedness, we tend to absorb the feelings, thoughts, moods and opinions of others.

We separate from others to sort through all that we have taken in, to review elements of our social exchanges and to evaluate them. Ultimately, solitude can enable us to reach a sense of internal peace, within which we can attentively listen until we are able to hear our own notes amidst the discordance surrounding us. The essence of productive solitude, as with all privacy, is the achievement of a sense of choice and free will, as well as of personal control.

This is about the clearest, most succinct statement that I have been able to write about my thoughts and feelings with regard to creative solitude, the internal and the external, internal peace, a relational interpersonal perspective and a sense of the potential effect of the opinions of others upon one’s own personality (however, the threads of this perspective have been the embedded subtext of many of my previously published clinical papers and books). In addition, it provides a tight integration of ideas about social interaction, self-evaluation, freedom, choice and self-control. Thinking in this manner does require one to adapt to a new way of reflection.

This adaption can be made smoothly once one begins to participate in consciously (and pre-consciously) co-constructed interpersonal relationships. In terms of this model of a contemporary analytic approach, I participate in ongoing conversations of this kind with the many young people with whom I am engaged in longer-term individual psychotherapy. These types of empathic conversations, I believe, are what energize the collaborative development of a mutually examined new kind of interpersonal relationship, which in turn appears to be a critical mutative factor in group settings.

With regard to the preceding comments, I very deeply hope that you will be able appreciate how this perspective is reflected in the selection of images that makes up The Photographic Essay, which I have created for you: Creative Solitude.

Thanks to all of you very, very much.

The Background Music for Creative Solitude: Marconi Union: “Sleepless”

Creative Solitude: A Photographic Essay