Читать книгу The Handbook of Solitude - Группа авторов - Страница 40

The experience of being alone, like the experience of being together, is an enticing topic for personality‐social psychologists interested in attachment. In this chapter, we have proposed and briefly explored an attachment perspective on solitude that follows Rubenstein and Shaver's (1982) early distinction between loneliness and positive solitude, with the former being more common in people with an insecure attachment orientation, and the latter being a healthy state sustained by a sense of security. However, most of the research on attachment and solitude has focused largely on insecure people’s heightened feelings of loneliness and have overlooked the possibility that secure individuals might be most comfortable with solitude, and might be able to pursue it and benefit from it in healthy, creative ways. That possibility has recently been studied by Gal (2019), as summarized here, but we need more systematic research on this topic and on the ways in which a sense of security provides a basis for developing a capacity to be alone and savor moments of solitude while maintaining a healthy balance between aloneness and togetherness.